Kantara, a film by Rishab Shetty, has generated a lot of talk since its debut, and for good reason. The mythical woodland God’s tale from a Kannada village was well received by a big portion of the crowd. However, the movie has faced criticism from a band for utilising their tunes without obtaining permission to use them in Kantara’s song Varaha Roopam. In spite of all of this, the movie was a financial success, ranking among the top films of 2022.
After the film was released on an OTT site, Tumbbad filmmaker Anand Gandhi finally watched it and made fun of Rishab Shetty’s director as a result. To find out the details, scroll down.
“Kantara is nothing like Tumbbad,” Anand Gandhi remarked on his Twitter account. Tumbbad was my attempt to use the horror genre as a parable against toxic masculinity and narrow-mindedness. These are celebrated in Kantara. For the uninitiated, Anand produced Tumbbad, a mystic horror folk tale movie that received widespread praise from critics despite its lacklustre box office performance.
However, as soon as the Tweet gained popularity, internet users began to comment on it. Some users of the internet agreed with Anand Gandhi, but the majority of them attacked him. One of them said, “Kantara isn’t liked for its convoluted plot; it’s liked for its connection to real Indian tulunadu tradition. The result was a movie that couldn’t have been made anywhere else. Therefore, I don’t understand your statement that everything is wrong in India right now.
“Those who will comprehend the films will grasp this as well,” another Twitteratti wrote. Your work was completely out of this world. It can be noted in one of the tweets that “Also, Tumbadd had its contours within Indian folklore without overtly using any traditional devices but still felt global as well.” Kantara still comes across as shallow and opportunistic despite using folk art as a prop and visual trick. “How precisely is Kantara shallow and exploitative?” another person tweeted.
Actually, this isn’t the first time a filmmaker has criticised Kantara. In a previous interview with ETimes, Abhiroop Basu said, “I feel the film is a mockery of anyone’s brains. No real character to root for, so-called plot twists that are dishonest and only serve as gimmicks, the protagonist’s laughable redemption arc, and by the time the movie reaches the much-discussed climax, I am no longer really interested.”