Kara underuses Mamitha Baiju, fans say

A day after Kara opened in theatres, the conversation around Vignesh Raja’s heist drama is splitting in an unusual direction. Dhanush’s lead performance as Karasaami is doing what Dhanush’s lead performances tend to do, and Mamitha Baiju’s screen time as his wife Selli has become the louder talking point.

Mamitha plays Selli, the second-billed role in the film. Across social media in the hours since release, fans have been noting that her presence is impactful but brief, and that the character feels written as a hinge for the male lead rather than as a person the film slows down to develop. The complaint is not that her performance is weak; most reactions concede the opposite. It is that the film does not give the second lead enough oxygen to register fully.

The reaction is feeding into a slightly larger Mamitha-specific conversation. After Premalu broke her into wider Indian-language consciousness, she had a clean run of bookings on the Tamil side: Dude landed warm reception, Vishwanathan & Sons opposite Suriya has built early curiosity off its teaser, and projects with Janadhipathi and Irandu Vaanam are in the pipeline. Kara was meant to be another rung on that climb. Instead it is being read by parts of the audience as a misstep, with at least one trade outlet noting that the Selli role had originally been offered to Kannada actress Chaitra, who passed on it.

The film itself has opened with a strong Day 1 of around six crore, with reviews praising Dhanush’s work and the 1991 Gulf War period-thriller framing while broadly agreeing that the supporting characters, including Selli, deserved more space than the screenplay made room for. Vignesh Raja, in his second feature after Por, co-wrote the script with Alfred Prakash. Whether the conversation around Mamitha hardens into actual market drag or settles down into normal post-release noise will probably be visible by the end of the opening week.