Join Us
Star Cast: Suriya, Mamitha Baiju, Radhika Sarathkumar, Raveena Tandon
Director: Venky Atluri
What’s Good: Venky Atluri’s sensible and mature writing that brings a winner of a film!
What’s Bad: The subplots including Raveena Tandon
Loo Break: Anytime you want!
Watch or Not?: Need a break from Bollywood cringe romances? Try this rom-com!
Language: Tamil, dubbed in Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada
Available On: Netflix
Runtime: 2 hours 40 minutes
User Rating:
Take a 40-year-old man – handsome, swooning, filthy rich, an Olympic medal winner, and bring a 20-something girl – bubbly, chirpy, looking for the man of her dreams, has some huge professional goals in life! Bring them together in any Bollywood commercial film and let them make you feel uncomfortable in a cringe-filled love story. Now turn the tables and hand this plot to Venky Atluri, who trusts his actors Suriya and Mamitha Baiju completely, and his actors reward him fairly with a film that works with restraint rather than melodrama, making it a mature age-gap romantic comedy! Vishwanath And Sons impresses you with a very honest attempt to entertain, but never crosses a certain line when it comes to the romance genre in particular!
Age-gap romances in mainstream Indian cinema have historically meant one of two things – either the hero is allowed to age while the heroine stays permanently 21 and nobody comments on it, or the film leans so hard into the discomfort that it becomes the entire point. Venky Atluri does neither. It asks its question plainly – can a man in his 40s and a woman in her early 20s actually fall in love, and should they? And then the film has the good sense to let two very good actors answer it, scene by scene, rather than a melodramatic script doing it for them.
Vishwanath And Sons Movie Review: Script Analysis
Sanjay Vishwanath (Suriya) is a wealthy industrialist and Olympic pistol-shooting medallist who has spent his adult life avoiding marriage for reasons the film takes time to reveal. His mother, Nirmala Devi (Radhika Sarathkumar), wants a grandchild, and Sanjay opts for surrogacy instead. A solution that has repercussions later when he is forced to find the mother of his child. Circumstances lead Vishwanath to Maddy (Mamitha Baiju), who is lured to live with the family as an immediate solution to a problem. But it leads to bigger problems when she falls in love with Vishwanath! Does he fall in love with her over time? Does this age-gap romance lead to a film that does not disappoint? You get all the answers in the next 2 hours!
Vishwanath And Sons Movie Review: Star Performance
Suriya delivers what might be his most internally conflicted performance in years – this isn’t the stylish, larger-than-life persona he’s built a career on, but a man visibly torn between what his heart wants and what his head insists is appropriate. He’s at his best in the smaller, quieter moments – whether that’s looking out for his child, or performing the last rites of his mother. It’s a performance built on restraint, and it mostly pays off.
Mamitha Baiju is, without exaggeration, the film’s beating heart. Maddy could so easily have been reduced to a manic whose only arc is to shake the hero out of his routine instead. Baiju plays her with a genuine spark without ever being passive, funny without becoming a punchline. Her comic timing is effortless, and crucially, she holds her own opposite an actor twenty years older.
Radhika Sarathkumar brings exactly the grounding warmth the film needs as Nirmala Devi. There’s a lovely, understated detail in her scenes! Her scenes with Baiju, in particular, have an easy tenderness that’s among the film’s most impactful material. Raveena Tandon, unfortunately, is stranded as the film’s weakest link. As Anjali, she’s given a role that exists mainly as filler. She brings a natural gravity to every scene she’s in, but the writing simply doesn’t give her enough to do that connects meaningfully to the story’s emotional core. A classic case of a good actor wasted!
Trending
Vishwanath And Sons Movie Review: Direction, Music
Venky Atluri, who also wrote the film, deserves real credit for the choice he didn’t make. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to turn the age gap, or the surrogacy itself, into the film’s central conflict and bring the routine trope – a disapproving family, the scandalized society, and a climax that would include one of the longest monologues on society and its hypocrisy. Atluri resists all of it. The obstacles here come from the choices made by his protagonist – Sanjay’s own sensible decision of not falling in love with a girl half his age! Sanjay’s choice to choose brain over heart amidst Maddy’s growing sense of self beyond the role she was hired for, and the ordinary friction of two people from different generations learning how to actually see each other makes this story too old school but probably, for that reason too real!
Atluri’s direction is confident precisely where it counts: he never lets the film slide into melodrama, even when the premise practically invites it. The tonal control here is genuinely impressive – pleasant, funny, and heart-touching moments coexist without any drama. GV Prakash Kumar delivers a soundtrack that leans into the film’s nostalgic, old-school romance. Nothing here is going to dominate on its own, but it serves as a mood-setting tool for the film’s central romance.
The film has a 90s-throwback sensibility – it is sincere, it is unhurried, and it is more interested in investing in emotions rather than dramatic loud conversations. However, the screenplay loses its footing in an extended subplot involving Sanjay’s stepmother, Anjali (Raveena Tandon), and a second family, which adds an unnecessary twist. It mostly just steals time from the relationship that the audience came to watch develop.
Vishwanath And Sons Movie Review: The Last Word
The Suriya-Baiju pairing is the film’s entire reason to exist, and it delivers. The film’s refusal to treat its own premise as an uncomfortable story is genuinely refreshing, and Radhika Sarathkumar’s mother-son dynamic with Suriya adds real emotions. Vishwanath And Sons earns the masterclass tag not because it reinvents the age-gap romance, but because it trusts its sensible and mature writing.
Venky Atluri tackles a 20-year age gap without a single shred of creepiness, giving us a boundary-respecting hero who actually acts his age. Meanwhile, Suriya and Mamitha Baiju spark an effortless, sparkling dynamic built on care, banter, and genuine respect. Radhika Sarathkumar and Mamitha Baiju share an endearing in-law dynamic that yields some of the film’s funniest and warmest scenes. Vishwanath And Sons is a heartwarming, wholesome, and delightfully progressive winner! Venky Atluri and Suriya deliver an absolute master class in how to handle a delicate age-gap dynamic with maturity, humor, and respect. The only thing the film misses out on is creating an emotional impact with more gravity, and dealing with the surrogacy and single fatherhood track with a better resolution!
4 stars.
Vishwanath And Sons Trailer
Stay tuned to Koimoi for more South Indian movie reviews!
Must Read: Varavu Movie Review: Joju George Starrer Focuses On Style Over Substance & Butchers Both
Follow Us: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Google News
