I was looking forward to Retro so much after the spectacular DoubleX. On paper, it has everything to be great: a writer who knows his craft, a music director who knows exactly what works for the movie, the lead actor producing it, a production house that has backed good works of art, and all the hype was positive until the release. It has been two days since I watched it, and I’m still wondering how the hell did this fantastic bunch of people make such a terrible movie.

With Retro, Karthik Subbaraj has stretched his limits in the usual challenges he gives himself while writing. After being too comfortable with a single genre shift, in Retro he has tried to mash in 4 or 5 genres into one and has failed miserably in the majority of it. He started the movie by setting the bar so high with that spectacular single shot that blends in the Kanima song so well that everything that followed turned out to be a disappointment, one after another. I appreciate the thought of exploring love, laughter, war, and folklore in a single movie, but it has just distracted KS as a writer too much that he has failed in most of it.

None of the emotions that he was trying to evoke had any lasting impact on me. There wasn’t even enough time to grieve for Paari’s lost love in jail before he went on to become the leader in jail. Right when I was getting into his redemption arc, we were forced to laugh at Jayaram’s jokes. It took a few scenes to even understand where this was going before we got to an island with random folklore that had nothing to do with any of the story that happened until now. Then, before trying to understand the environment there, we once again got a mixture of mass moments and love reconciliation scenes. The screenplay was just completely all over the place, and it didn’t let any emotion sit with me for enough time to even process it.

KS is a master in using Chekhov’s gun but has used it in terrible ways in multiple places in Retro. Paari learning martial arts and inner peace during his imprisonment could have been taken to different levels of character elevation but turned out to be bleak, mass moments in unnecessary scenes. Surya’s character itself is just all over the place – he’s teaching morals to a bunch of gangsters, falling in love with his childhood crush, blackmailing a therapist to travel with him in a quest to find his love, lying his way to gain his love back, joining a cult to cope with his love failure, and transforming into a god to save his people. And none of these have any reasoning behind them other than just KS using his creative license to put together because someone pushed him to complete a project within a deadline.

Most of the second half just felt like KS trying to make a shittier version of DoubleX. It has the same story but with poor execution and a lot more unnecessary stuff shoved into it. With just a small change in the climax where the tribals don’t actually die. What was he even thinking?

But with this diverse canvas, Surya does give commendable performances in multiple places. Especially in the Joker-esque laugh sequence, Surya has explored his extremes. Jayaram is the only other actor whose performance stands out. Everyone else just gives the minimal necessary effort to portray the already lazily written characters in a broken screenplay. Santhosh Narayanan and Shreyaas Krishna (DOP) have given their life and soul into every scene. Even for some bad elevation and love scenes, the music still stands out. And the metaphors of laughter all along were good to catch as Easter eggs but die out because of the overall bad product.

I admire KS’s ambition though – Retro is the creative equivalent of a high‑wire act without a safety net. Here’s hoping his next balance between style and substance sticks the landing.