‘Ahimsa’ movie review: Abhiram Daggubati exacerbates a harrowing crime-thriller

A still from ‘Ahimsa’

It does not matter how much of Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin or Virginia Woolf you read, you can always count on Tollywood to reinvent misogyny in ways previously not known to man.

Raghu (Abhiram Daggubati) is a farmer in a remote village and a follower of the principle of Ahimsa (non-violence) taught by Mahatma Gandhi, so much so that even when his girlfriend Ahalya (Geethika Tiwary) — who also happens to be his first cousin — calls for help after being molested, he delivers a moral lesson to the perpetrator in the importance of respecting women. He is the innocent happy-go-lucky boy next door who can do wrong; a strict vegetarian, refuses to kiss his own girlfriend, and preaches a sermon when she tries to gorge on some delicious mutton curry. He turns loving him into a chore, but like the good textbook girlfriend, Ahalya sticks around even though she gets the short end of the stick from both Raghu and the filmmaker. 

We are introduced to close-ups of Geethika’s navel even before we get to know her character’s name and the sexualisation only keeps getting worse. By turning her into a sexual object meant to be leered at by the characters and the audience alike, the filmmakers treat her like a provocateur and absolve the characters and themselves of any and all malicious intentions.

Raghu and Ahalya’s seemingly normal lives are disrupted when the sons of an influential man rape Ahalya and leave her unconscious by the road. Raghu takes on the responsibility to bring her rapists to justice during which he encounters a girl boss-esque female lawyer who does not back down from a verbal fight in the courtroom, a cartel smuggling marijuana in thick forests, witnesses who turn hostile, and institutions that rally behind the powerful. 

Oh, there is also a re-enactment of the rape scene in the hospital ward right next to the unconscious victim, and Raghu tries to improve her condition by rubbing herbal medicine on her body which only makes it worse. When everything fails, he kisses her… to bring her back to consciousness. 

As if women in their film and the audience have not suffered enough already, they add one last item song to make sure we do not mistake them for feminists who care for their characters. One cannot ignore that almost all the characters who are killed in this quest for justice are women. 

I remain confused about the filmmakers’ intentions even after sitting through the two-hour forty-two-minute long film that is two hours too long. At this point, I would rather take a muscular protagonist without morals — indulging in action sequences and physically hurting rapists — than watch another minute of a stingy boy-next-door who seems to draw his heroism by solely associating with a brutalised woman and abandoning his values thereafter.

Ahimsa is currently running in theatres