Sing Geetham review: the village that can only sing

Most filmmakers at 94 are the subject of retrospectives. Singeetham Srinivasa Rao is still inventing new grammar. Sing Geetham, a project he reportedly carried for four decades, asks one simple, mad question: what if an entire village could only talk by singing?

The setup earns the gimmick rather than imposing it. Kuberapuram is a gold-mining village where greed has flattened everything green except one last tree. Gowri (Ahilya Bamroo), the local firebrand, guards it against Renu (Shalini Kondepudi), the mine owner’s daughter who sees only lumber and profit. When the tree falls, Gowri prays to the deity Kubera for a world without lies, and the village wakes up unable to speak a word, only sing. Pratap (Ayaan), the outsider buying into the mine, becomes our way in.

For a while it is genuinely enchanting. Devi Sri Prasad is the real lead here. Scoring a film where ordinary conversation has to scan and rhyme is a brutal ask, and DSP makes the sung dialogue feel natural by the interval. The world is stuffed with the kind of Singeetham oddballs you cannot invent on demand: a quack who treats the “singing flu” with fever tablets, a man allergic to music, a barber who weaponises gossip.

The catch is the first half. The novelty thins before the plot kicks in, and a few episodes circle the same joke until you feel every minute of the runtime. The format also flattens scenes meant to land hard, tipping a couple of emotional beats into unintentional comedy. The story underneath, save the tree and save the soul, is the stuff of a hundred earnest shorts.

Then the second half rallies. A flashback carried by Nivetha Pethuraj gives the fable an emotional spine, the cave and gold-statue stretches finally look as imaginative as the premise, and the climax, where the village pools its greed to save two lives, genuinely moves you.

Uneven and overlong, but worth it for the swing alone. 3/5.