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Most times when one comes across a beautiful house or an extremely luxurious restaurant or an extremely pricey car, one stands awestruck and keeps staring at it for a few seconds. Then quickly one realizes the shit hole they are in and continue with their life agreeing to the fact that they can never have that home or car or eat in that restaurant. This movie gives us the same feeling. And its quite aptly titled too – Sorgavassal (meaninng Gateway to heaven), its just the gateway to heaven and not heaven itself. And just because one has reached the gateway to heaven or staring at it doesn’t mean one has entered heaven.

Directed by Siddharth Vishwanath, this movie deals with the weight of hoping for something but not happening vs not hoping for anything and setting up expectations accordingly. The movie is quite gripping at large. We have come across such movies in the past, “Virumaandi” for example or say “Side A”/ “Side B” or the grand old “Mahanadi” movie by Kamal Hassan too gives us a sneak peek of what happens inside prisons.

One could also draw parallels to the legendary cult movie Shawshank Redemption in a more subtler or common-man ish way. This movie deals with prison trauma where the protagonist (RJ Balaji) is trapped into a prison sentence using hearsay evidence and how he struggles with that. There are also other ambitious characters in the movie that leave an impact. One of them being Karunas who rose from a comedian to a character artist to even a lead role but had been missing since the past many years. It’s good to see him back on the big screen. Karunas plays the role of a jailer here and his character is present through out the movie.

The most impactful character is portrayed by Selva Raghavan who seems very authentic and gets into the skin of the character. Easily one of his best performances till date.

The script is so neat and tight that this movie would have made an impact with or without RJ Balaji. But it definitely is a good movie to have on his resume. Since he has been a RJ in the past, I somehow felt his voice was able to emote more than his eyes or expressions as such in the movie. The subtle and layered revelations, the parallel narrations and legit looking cast and prison settings definitely add to the script’s strength.

This movie is available on Netflix and is a highly recommended watch. This movie has a lot of violence so viewer’s discretion is advised.

Movie Rating = 3.5 out of 5

–Varun Gowtham Mannava