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Join UsStar Cast: Santosh Shoban, Kavya Thapar, Shraddha Das, Brahmaji, Sudharshan, Sapthagiri, Posani Krishna Murali, and others
Director: Karthik Rapolu
What’s Good: A confident Santosh Shoban, taking up a subject that is taboo and unexplored. Also, his dancing skills are fun.
What’s Bad: The age-old ghost of dragging, and preachy messaging haunting the film at super crucial points.
Loo Break: Strictly not in the first half.
Watch or Not?: You can’t entirely give this one a pass. It has a fresh subject, an earnest lead actor who has kept his ego/insecurities completely aside to say yes to a conversation such as this.
User Rating:
Santosh (Santosh Shoban) is a guy who, from a very young age, starts believing that he has small-sized p*nis. Now grown up, 25 years old is on the verge of being depressed because of his condition. After having tried everything possible, from the Internet advised medicines, to Ayurveda, to even machines that promise to grow the size, Santosh succeeds with none. The biggest conflict arises when he is about to get married and does not want to cheat with the girl and end up not making her happy.
Ek Mini Katha Movie Review: Script Analysis
It isn’t an unknown observation that Telugu cinema is fast pacing to join the world in the race to the evolution of content. The fact that a film that is being marketed so rampantly by the biggest of the South actors (Prabhas & Ram Charan), a sought after debutant actor opting for it without any doubt, are very much proofs.
Ek Mini Katha is a story about 25-year-old suffering from a syndrome where he feels that his p*nis is too small and that it is of no use. But does size really matters? Writer Merlapaka Gandhi explores this single line. Now, it is visible that to tackle an issue as fresh and delicate as this, the makers take the ‘educate by making them laugh at it’ route. The one that Bollywood films like Bala, Vicky Donor or Shubh Mangal Saavdhan have taken (all Ayushmann Khurrana!).
Merlapaka does create Santosh with a problem, but he isn’t agitated in a way that he is destructive for his surrounding. Instead, he is the most understanding guy in the frame at any given time. For that, they make the world around him comical. Everyone on his side of the spectrum are exaggerated versions of people we meet. This is probably also because, Santosh’s problem is in his pants, and the gateway to it is only his gloomy face. To make that shine, the surrounding extra vibrant, so you see the dullness in him.
Now, this is a new territory, completely untouched. And when the film begins on a hilarious note, while making its point clear, it is a bonus. Ek Mini Katha manages to be hilarious, with the majority of jokes hitting the right note. But what begins like a laugh riot and fresh content takes a dip after the interval. Curse of the second half! The screenplay begins to get repetitive, things more unbelievable, and the comedy becomes more TV soap standards, compared to the first half.
Not criticising the choice of subject, and the handling of the main lead at all. But only if films could rely on a well written main lead! What also kills the rather fun experience is the sequence by the climax that becomes preachy. I know you are educating people about a problem that many of us go through. But don’t educate me in my face. While the fact that Gandhi nicely introduces parents’ ignorance to the child’s doubt, the societal pressure of being ‘big’ in every aspect, and the self doubt it leads, the effect of it is pulled down when a character by the end talks about all of it like a lecture. We have got the point brother, no need to spoon-feed.
Also, 7thd standard students being concerned about their p*nis sizes is a bit unbelievable. I could be wrong, but at least not when I was in 7th.
Ek Mini Katha Movie Review: Star Performance
Santosh Shoban is a charmer in his own way. There is a sense of ‘one amongst us’ in his demeanour and that helps the most. The actor puts aside all the insecurities and becomes the boy who thinks he is not big enough in his pants. I hope he continues to be that vulnerable in choosing roles and evolves more as an actor. And a petition to have more of Shoban dancing!
Sudarshan, who plays Darshan, Santosh’s friend, is a comic relief to the script and manages to do his job hilariously. Watch out for a scene where there is a Sonu Sood reference. Brahmaji plays Shoban’s father and gets a meaty character to play with, and he doesn’t let us down. Kavya Thapar does what the script demands from her.
Ek Mini Katha Movie Review: Direction, Music
Direction by Karthik Rapolu is aware and set in the current times. The year is 2021, and he creates the vibe that someone is talking to you directly in Ek Mini Katha. Santosh slightly breaking the fourth wall to explain his father’s gibberish, or the Sonu Sood reference, are Easter eggs for one to catch and instantly connect it all to the real world.
What it does lack in is giving a more layered universe to the connections Santosh makes outside his family. Cinematography by Gokul Bharathi is staple. He gets creative with the dance numbers, and I am so impressed with the choreography and staging of the songs.
Music by Praveen Lakkaraju is perfect for the film, but the shelf life outside this universe is debatable.
Ek Mini Katha Movie Review: The Last Word
It is a fresh subject that no one has yet touched. An earnest actor making sure he doesn’t let down people who have hope in him. But what fails him is the dip in the screenplay and the preachiness of it all. You can give it a try.
Ek Mini Katha Trailer
Ek Mini Katha releases on 27th May, 2021.
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Read our Karnan review featuring Dhanush to know if that’s a better watch.
