Dhinakaran Sivalingam’s ‘Bottle Radha’ is a solid drama about being an alcoholic and being with an alcoholic

Guru Somasundaram, Sanchana Natarajan, and John Vijay give fantastic performances in this sobering story about how difficult it is to give up a habit. The rest of this review contains spoilers.

One of the pleasures of cinema-watching is seeing that genuinely good actors like Guru Somasundaram have come into their own, to the extent of having films built around them. Bottle Radha is not a movie that would have worked with just a star, or the kind of “known face” who is usually cast because they have poster value. This is a difficult film about an alcoholic, and it needs an actor. It needs someone like Guru Somasundaram, who is also something of a star, thanks to Minnal Murali. (I guess that’s another reason to thank Malayalam cinema.) In Bottle Radha, the actor plays a man skilled in construction work. He is an A-grade tile-layer. He is also an A-grade alcoholic, who gets sacked from a job in the film’s opening sequence, a static single-take stretch where cinematographer Roopesh Shaji establishes the camera aesthetic. The frames are slightly wobbly, almost as if the camera was also drunk and swaying.

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https://www.galattaplus.com/dhinakaran-sivalingams-bottle-radha-is-a-solid-drama-about-being-an-alcoholic-and-being-with-an-alcoholic/

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