In This Dispatch

Josephine

In the backseat of her parents’ car, an eight-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) searches the word “rape” on her mother’s phone. We only see her face as she scrolls through the results, but we know what’s happening: her world is rapidly widening in unspeakably terrible ways as she seeks to understand the assault she witnessed the day before. The effects of this earth-shattering event on both the girl and her parents are the subject of Josephine, the new film by Beth de Araújo, and the winner of this year’s Sundance Grand Jury and Audience prizes.

Separated from her father (Channing Tatum) on their Sunday morning run, Josephine witnesses a man follow a jogger into a park bathroom and then assault her in the clearing beside it. The scene is arguably graphic to the point of excess, but it is important to our efforts at understanding Josephine’s mental state afterward that we see exactly what she does. It may even free us of the assumption that we, experienced adults, are so better equipped to handle an event than a child. If seeing this shakes us, imagine what is happening to Josephine.

In the ensuing days, Josephine’s behavior grows erratic, sometimes violent, and she, educated by what she can glean from a computer, closes herself off from the terrors of the world and starts to become suspicious of all men, even male dogs. Meanwhile, her parents’ lives are thrown into disarray and their ideologies into conflict. Her father, Damien, is motivated by fear, anger, and a sense of justice. He wants to enroll Josephine in self-defense classes and make her testify to put the rapist behind bars. When he catches up to Josephine in the park, he sprints after the fleeing assailant, paying little attention to the victim on the ground. If it appears that Tatum is playing himself, it’s only a testament to how naturally he is able to embody the casually frail masculinity of a concerned girl dad. Her mother, Claire (Gemma Chan), meanwhile, wants Josephine to see a psychologist and fears that appearing in court would place undue responsibility on the shoulders of a child, only setting her up for more disappointing encounters with harsh reality if conviction proves elusive. Where Damian’s fears are borne out of imagination and papa-bear protectiveness, Claire operates from the knowing place of womanhood, the pain of the woman in the park being one she knows intimately.

Unrelenting shallow-focus and the occasional POV shot lock the film tightly into Josephine’s perspective, only straying from her emotional reality in brief moments where de Araújo needs a bit of context from the girl’s parents. When a detective visits their family to discuss the possibility of Josephine testifying, the camera repeatedly rotates 360 degrees in a dizzying, headache-inducing long take — because more than any of the dialogue’s actual participants, we are with Josephine, running around the table in the background and playing a game of duck-duck-goose. In the seat beside her father sits the rapist from the park, a ghost only Josephine can see; he appears this way throughout the film, most often when she is otherwise alone in her bedroom.

Though these techniques are effective at grounding Josephine in its subject’s interiority and generating empathy through shared experience, going so far as to make an audience feel trapped in the fracturing mind of an eight year old — her eventual subjection to cross-examination in court is appropriately painful — they also betray the filmmakers’ limited aesthetic range and point toward a frustrating strategy of sick-making agitation. Stress is currently something of a cinematic buzzword with filmmakers like the Safdies and their associates making careers out of not panning away from their own Travis Bickles’ most uncomfortable moments. In that micro-movement, discomfort becomes a propulsion engine; to be stressed out is to be thrilled. De Araújo, whose previous film put viewers inside the maelstrom of a hate crime, uses anxiety to different ends, as neither excitement nor humor is in her film’s purview, but it’s worth questioning this tendency toward distress when it becomes excessive.

Anyone with severe trauma, including and especially children, can be liable to extreme behavior, but there is a difference between sensitively portraying this and rubbing one’s nose in it. In this regard, Josephine too often overshoots. When a boy at school, embarrassed at losing a game of arm wrestling to a girl, pushes her to the ground, Josephine responds by grabbing a nearby shopping bag and throwing it over the boy’s head, pulling it back like an assassin in a movie. Did she learn this in her karate class? Would simply whaling on the kid be too passé? The scene demands an overreaction, but this is so unbelievable. Further, incidents like this one and a similar outburst later in the film are some of the few times that Josephine puts distance between us and its titular character, rupturing the empathetic project in the name of shock. And a few, blessedly rare stabs at poetry — who can say what a face pressed into the flesh of an apple rotting in timelapse is meant to evoke, really? — likewise provide embarrassing flourishes of another flavor. These and other misjudged moments accumulate throughout, steering Josephine away from its observational strengths and toward the unfortunate, familiar schema of cloying Sundance fare. — CHRIS MELLO

The Violinist

If anyone watches The Violinist, there is a good chance this has something to do with the spotlight thrown upon it by its being awarded the top prize at the Annecy Animation Film Festival earlier this year. The film itself is rather unrewarding. It is not an exemplary work of animation, history, or political artistry, though it can claim a footnote in local animation history, as the first feature to be completed in Singapore in 15 years.

The presence of The Violinist at festivals and, as a long shot, in wider distribution, speaks to the role of the contemporary festival as a distribution and co-production hub rather than an arbiter of artistic vision or aesthetic risk-taking. Because of Singapore’s lack of a consistent funding structure for filmmaking, one could say that this film, directed by Ervin Han and Raúl García, has been tailored solely to make it into festivals, to have the right discourse around it, and certain novelties to append to it in order to sustain a yearlong festival lifespan. But once the deals are done and the laurels have filled the poster, the film itself offers very little to an actual viewer.

There are two figures in The Violinist’s plot who play the violin. Fei is the career performer about to retire who deigns to give an intrepid magazine journalist a retrospective interview in the film’s frame narrative. We might expect a tribute film that traces a life back to an original inspiration, as in Hugo or Millennium Actress. But the other violinist is Kai, a member of the servant class who learns the instrument on the sly and gains an appreciation for the art that has nothing to do with its status in the cultural hierarchy. Their different social standings matter when the Sino-Japanese War breaks out, and each feels a different degree of pressure to engage in or abstain from political activity.

This is a reliably involving premise, and with it comes the ever-relevant question of an artist’s responsibilities. Its ambitious feature-length scope and the fact that the Japanese are the unqualified villains make it rather unusual for an animation project. But the film is schematic and rudimentary in its approach. Unlike past Annecy-praised European co-productions like Flow or Flee, the voice acting and animation work are distractingly substandard, which might be excused if the overall design of the film was of interest in its own right. Instead, the film takes for granted that its Singaporean perspective on WWII is a novelty for an international audience, and relates its chronology with Wikipedia-like distance. What’s more, the script itself is so full of presentist language, aphorisms that arrive with logical errors, and generic summations that, even if LLM assistance wasn’t used in its scripting, it commits the similar fault of being so full of cliché that it renders much of the film — and its attendant political struggles, war orphans, suspenseful bombing raids, and its one miraculously intact violin—as bathetic.

The film’s insistence on classical music as the crux of art and survival is, upon closer examination than Fei’s voiceover narration, also rather dubious. The violin duets that build throughout the film’s opening act are meant to stand in for romance between Fei and Kai — but the way their relationship is rendered stays neatly within the bounds of adopted siblings, which makes Fei’s decades-long loyalty hard to buy as melodrama. Kai’s innate musical prodigy status, which requires zero practice or a hospitable environment, along with a side narrative involving the classical learnedness of a Japanese soldier, also act as an elevated plane of sympathy; the death of all others is vaguely tragic, but the animators treat this attunement to the art form as shorthand for a humanizing trait. Perhaps the starkest punctuation to this focal point arrives in the film’s long denouement, where Fei’s voiceover summarizes post-war anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, Indonesia, and French Indochina as merely a period when “everyone was searching for something elusive.” In this way, The Violist ultimately proves too safe, and perhaps even blithe, about its epic subject matter in a way that short-circuits its potential accomplishments. — MICHAEL SCOULAR

Elephants in the Fog

The pressure of representation weighs heavily on Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog. With its accessible arthouse style and the sobriety of its subject matter, it’s a movie transparently angling for the acceptance of an international audience, and its well-received Cannes premiere earlier this year indicates that, in this regard, it’s a success. Nepali cinema seldom earns this kind of global attention, and movies featuring trans actors in leading roles remain dispiritingly few; the combination of modest style, progressive politics, and an unchallenging portrait of a lesser-known corner of the world in cinema both shines a light on the trans Nepali community and, perhaps, does it a disservice.

Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama) is a matriarch in a village of Kinnar women in rural Nepal, bordering a forest inhabited by elephants, rarely seen but frequently feared. When Aspara (Aliz Ghimire), one of her adopted daughters, goes missing, Pirati’s search uncovers secrets in both women’s lives, forcing interactions between the Kinnars and the largely hostile locals in the nearby town. Shah acknowledges the reality of living in a society that denies your existence — the women seek truth and justice, yet generally suffer only injustice — without victimizing his subjects, affording them agency and stressing their resilience. Times may be tough, but these women are tougher.

The film’s juxtaposition of thriller elements and the ethnography-lite setting is pretty smooth, with Shah’s quasi-classical approach serving it well. That approach is solid and sensitive, and basically unassailable — he knows who to shoot and how, leaves no loose ends, and there are no questionable edits or music cues. Indeed, everything is so smooth that one soon begins to crave a little edge. Elephants in the Fog is a movie without risk or roughness, or indeed any identifiable directorial signature, and the palatability of it all feels particularly milquetoast considering the conflict inherent to the plot and scenario. Great trans cinema, or even great cinema focusing on any marginalized demographic, is often defined by its subversion, its protesting nature, its fundamental, innate non-conformity. The tastefulness of Elephants in the Fog thus seems relatively conciliatory, a concession made in pursuit of exposure.

Yet, accepting the legitimacy of Shah’s vision (admittedly a little difficult, given that this is a vision of a queer Asian community apparently intended for cishet Western audiences), it’s hard to fault his handling of it. The thriller contrivances in the plot feel germane to the setting and characters, and each new direction illuminates something genuine — there’s a faithfulness to reality in every narrative decision that harbors investment. As Pirati’s search for her daughter becomes more desperate and widespread, she must examine the rules by which she’s led her safe but sheltered life until now, and the contradictions she’s indulged in as a means of escape. Indeed, the whole movie is a meditation on escape — from society into cloistered communities, from dogma into indiscretion, from spirituality into practicality, from the burden of responsibility into liberation.

If the final, stirring scene represents the ultimate liberation of escape — from respectability into defiance — its impact is only so great in relief to what has preceded it. Shah preaches a radical approach that he can’t himself adopt. The boldness of the characters’ actions at this moment is thus safely secured within the confines of the screen, a revolt against passive conformity that Shah only shows, never truly endorses. His compliance to the rules of respectable representation has brought welcome attention to people too rarely seen or heard in cinema, and the movie he’s made is undoubtedly effective in telling its story. But it’s an ironic compliance, not echoed by the message of that movie, and so the message sounds merely mumbled when it should have been shouted. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Nosotros

Guatemala on-screen is underrepresented, fertile territory. Mad Mel’s Apocalypto is likely the region’s highest profile depiction, or you could look toward El Norte from Gregory Nava for something a little more grounded — a tale which tells of two children trying to leave the place. But what of the nearly 19 million who stayed and live there to this day? Surely they have stories to tell. Mexican-Guatemalan filmmaker Joaquín Ruano believes so, and his debut film Nosotros offers a moody reprieve from stereotypes about the country, transposing the schema of the doomed queer romance onto Guatemala’s capital. His approach deepens the richness of the setting in our minds, if not the formulaic romance for which it serves as a backdrop.  

Romero is an indigenous Guatemalan who leaves his village for Guatemala City to support his wife and child financially. He finds a job as a security guard at a mall, only to fall in love with the owner of a cellphone store there, Nubia. Nubia is a trans woman, but Ruano wisely doesn’t make her identity a focal point of the drama — it’s just a fact of her existence. Instead, Romero and Nubia share delicate moments together in cars and motel rooms, waxing about the nature of community and finding consolation in the warmth of the other’s arms. It’s well-worn territory, and Ruano tries to dodge the story’s more generic qualities by simply leaving most of them out. Ellipses dot the film’s narrative landscape, leaving questions open or left to our preexisting knowledge of the romantic drama’s structure.

Debut filmmakers in the arthouse world have a tendency to be overly studied as of late, their films more curated than created. Ruano is no exception, and his style is deeply referential. He grabs influences from across the globe: Pedro Costa can be found in the street lights streaming through windows to bathe sex workers in sanctity; Bresson in his characters’ stoicism and poise (or maybe Lav Diaz at ludicrous speed, shots lasting “merely” 20-30 seconds); most chiefly, Cuarón by way of Roma in its careful tableaux, framing his subjects within architecture to emphasize their social context. There are worse apples to bite off of, though, and some honest moments emerge from the match between antecedents and milieu. Toward the end of the film, a giant McDonald’s sign towers over a dark road. A car passes by, and Ruano pans over to a giant cross lit up in the night; it captures the collision of traditional faith and fast-paced consumer culture endemic to globalization. It’s a good image, it just has nothing to do with the narrative. 

There are a lot of moments that have nothing, or very little, to do with Romeo and Nubia’s plight, and they happen to be the film’s most carefully observed: a group of newly anointed security guards posing with their firearms for a photo taken on an Android phone; a CRTV displaying footage of Romeo wandering the mall’s corridors; a shot gazing out of a windshield on a rainy night as Nubia parks her car and music plays. Ruano appears more interested in the world around his characters than he is in the characters themselves. Moreover, he seems slightly afraid of them. When passion erupts in Nosotros, Ruano’s camera deflects or looks the other way. It’s one thing to defy the cliché of the impulsive and reckless Latin American, but it’s another to shirk away from normal human feeling. At the beginning of the movie, Romeo sits on a bed with his wife Jacina as they hold each other in center frame; later, Romeo makes love to Nubia out of frame — both allude to an urgency Ruano pointedly leaves out of his telling. There’s warmth, but never enough heat to generate a sustainable flame, so once tragedy strikes the film’s central relationship toward the end of the film, it doesn’t bowl us over or upend any expectations set by said relationship; it just happens because the movie gods dictate it.

Nosotros is saddled with many of the frailties first-time auteurist directors must (or rather ought to) contend with. The film communicates some very real and uncomfortable truths about queer and interracial love in 2026 — in a brief aside, Nubia’s employee asks her why she’s into Indians, and Romeo’s co-workers often bully him for what they perceive as a gay relationship — yet they’re undermined by Ruano’s evasive ambiguities and artful sensitivities. Ruano clearly has good taste and an eye for the small pleasures of Guatemalan life, but as yet he can’t cohere these strengths into a satisfying whole. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

Glaxo

Argentinean director Benjamín Naishtat garnered notice about 15 years ago, primarily with a trio of innovative, highly unusual feature films. 2014’s History of Fear was a nearly abstract nocturne focused on the various ways that a society can break down, turning its participants against one another. On a meta-level, it was about the different ways anxieties are mass-produced in order to keep the populace docile. Even better was Naishtat’s follow-up, 2015’s The Movement. Set in the Pampas in the 19th century, the film was a crucible of conflicting political impulses and crossed allegiances, in which desperate men swear fealty to whoever holds the gun. Somewhat more conventional but equally tense was 2018’s Rojo. In that film, a prominent lawyer has an altercation with a stranger in a restaurant. From that point on, he is under the microscope of those who would very soon consolidate their power into the 1976 dictatorship.

To say that Glaxo is a disappointment is a bit misleading. It is a reasonably well-crafted period piece that uses the post-Peronist junta period as the backdrop for a tale of personal betrayal and regret. Bookended by scenes from 1984, most of the film takes place in the mid-’50s, when the main characters are in their late teens. Like Naishtat’s earlier films, Glaxo is about the ways that craven individuals ingratiate themselves to those in power, but unlike his previous films, Glaxo recreates small-town Argentina in too-perfect, almost nostalgic tones. The then-and-now element feels incredibly familiar, a sense only amplified by the extensive narration, much of which seems to be taken directly from Hernán Ronsino’s source novel.

In the opening scene, two men are watching The Terminator in a half-empty theater. Vardemann (Esteban Bigliardi) is explaining the plot to his friend Bicho (Alan Sabbagh). In the course of their conversation, we realize that Vardemann has just gotten out following a very long stretch in prison. We hear about another old friend, Miguelito, who is dying. People want to know whether Vardemann will see Miguelito, and then we return to the men’s young adulthood in the ‘50s, where Naishtat fills in the extensive backstory of this friend group. But watch carefully, because an even earlier period is depicted in short bursts within the primary narrative. This involves a baleful police sergeant, Folcada (Marcelo Subiotto), who cements his power by performing extrajudicial killings at the behest of the authorities in Buenos Aires.

For reasons having more to do with chance than personal ambition, young Miguelito (Joaquín Bonadeo) is taken under Folcada’s wing. The boys are all mesmerized by Folcada’s young, flirtatious wife Miranda (Lali Espósito), nicknamed “Negra” because of her short, jet-black hair. The music cues when Miranda appears on screen, and the way she is visualized entirely through the gaze of others, all telegraph Naishtat’s intentions. She is a femme fatale, and she has been the ruin of many a poor boy. And indeed, Miguelito is her newest conquest.

Glaxo would be a much more honest-seeming film had Naishtat made it in black-and-white. It is interesting that the film takes place not exactly during the Peronista years or the Dirty War, but just in between. Situated in the penumbra of authoritarianism, Glaxo looks both forward and back, but without staking out clear historical stakes. The film seems to suggest that a dictatorship is always just in the offing, that people are reliably callow and self-serving, and that only those who commit unspeakable offenses against their fellow citizens can hope to move through the world with any degree of freedom. The all-pervasive cynicism of film noir is certainly a choice. But by postulating that human nature never changes, Glaxo shrugs off any historical perspective from which we might learn something. Betrayal is the coin of the realm, and the realm takes slightly different forms but essentially endures. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Dorothy

As the popular online adage goes, Cinephilia is a disease, and few exemplify this better than filmmakers themselves. Shaped by the forms, narratives and dramaturgies that constituted their cinematic initiation, filmmakers often find it difficult to go beyond these formative (pun intended) experiences, trapped seemingly forever by their anxieties of influence, to borrow the title of Harold Bloom’s famous book. None of this means that these cinephilic filmmakers, some of whom are good and a few among them even great, do not have an auteurial stamp of their own, or an absence of thematic preoccupations, stylistic tics, and structure. It’s just that when these filmmakers, particularly those who operate in a mainstream mode, question the very cinema that made them, problems start compounding. When this happens, the majority of this cursed community churns out smugly complacent films, those which congratulate themselves for the mere act of addressing these questions without any thought about their inherited form. Consequently, these films lap up all the awards and even the approvals of many critics, for they seemingly absolve us of all guilt while projecting a “woke” image, cocooning us further in our already insulated community. But even in the mainstream, a small tribe of filmmakers — the most famous name being Martin Scorsese — grapple with these very questions that haunt cinephilia, trying to both declare their love for their influences and question their problematic elements. They understand that these questions, be it in the representations of women or marginalized communities, are very much a matter of form, and attempt to integrate them into the fabric of their aesthetic. However, more often than not, muscle memory kicks in, and these questions are often yanked by their entrenched impulses, leaving us not with a dialogue of productive contradictions, but a contest that can sadly have only one winner.

Karthick Subburaj’s films have been plagued by these very problems, in spite of his earnestness at confronting his cinephilia. An able genre filmmaker who began tackling social themes and subjects from his second film, Jigarthanda (2014), Subburaj has always sought to reconcile the macho forms of the films he loves — an eclectic mix which includes Tamil Masala cinema and dramas, martial arts and Spaghetti Westerns — with weighty themes of caste and patriarchal oppression that strike right at the roots of these very forms. His passionate love for Masala cinema and its heroes, especially a certain actor named Rajinikanth, whose superstardom has elevated him to demigod heights in Tamil Nadu, is at constant odds with his sincere efforts to undermine the masculine violence that undergird both the films and the society it springs from. In this light, there is a certain kinship with Tamil filmmakers as diverse as Pa. Ranjith and Mari Selvaraj, both of whom, in essence, are asking the same aesthetic question as Subburaj: What does a progressive Masala film that celebrates its virtues and critiques its shortcomings look like?

In Dorothy (2026), it appears that Subburaj might have found the answer that has been eluding his previous films. He has always been the kind of filmmaker to emphatically trumpet his influences, and he doubles-down on this approach in Dorothy. The film is set in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a period whose famous songs and films are frequently quoted in Subburaj’s earlier films. He goes one step further and ropes in Ilayaraja, arguably Tamil cinema’s greatest music director — behind most of the iconic film songs from the ‘80s — to fill that role here. References to Ilayaraja’s own compositions, ‘50s Tamil Songs, Bruce Lee, Rajinikanth, and Tamil directors like Mani Ratnam and Bharathiraja continually abound, and Subburaj, once again, immerses us in a testosterone-fuelled environment rife with caste violence, domestic abuse and patriarchal fiefdoms. The danger of slipping into the nostalgia of his youth always remains, but Subburaj has been unafraid to walk on this tightrope, even as his social message is often undercut by his forays into genre thrills in his earlier works. His tenacity to engage with rather than excise the aesthetic that made him rather has finally found fruit in Dorothy, where he reshapes and molds these familiar elements into something strikingly new, while still retaining the masala ethos of intermingling multiple moods and emotions — songs, dance, humor, drama, romance, and action — an ethos often likened to the multiplicity of flavors emerging from an Indian masala.

His protagonists — Subbu (Sananth) and Karthi (Rishikanth), presumably named after the forename and surname of the director himself — are two bosom buddies from a village near Madurai. Karthi tells Subbu’s brothers that he killed Subbu as requested, and the film shifts to flashbacks from their childhood as Karthi seemingly mourns his loss. We see the protagonists as children, with Subbu charmingly trying to defend Karthi from bullies through Bruce-Lee styled hijinks. Subbu passes on the masculine credo he had obtained from his monstrous brothers and father to Karthi, and they soon become close friends. In a characteristically quirky montage, we quickly witness these friends growing up in this brutish, fiercely casteist environment, enamored by the local hoodlums (or rowdies, the English term commonly used even when speaking in Tamil) and eventually becoming a part of one of the rowdies’ gangs. The roles have naturally reversed here, with Karthi taking up the masculine mantle and Subbu being the more timid sidekick. The titular character (Keerthy Suresh), meanwhile, comes into Subbu’s household as his brother’s wife, and she ends up irrevocably impacting Subbu’s and Karthi’s lives.

The territory does seem familiar, but Subburaj’s particular talent for twisting and contorting his plot in unexpected directions finds its finest expression here. In his earlier work, the initial excitement of tying together these kinds of various threads atrophied because of his recourse to easy sentimentality, but in this film, as in Jigarthanda DoubleX (2023, a spiritual sequel to Jigarthanda), his narrative bends according to a guiding principle. While he couldn’t sustain the conflicting tonalities in the latter film, as he was carried away by the overpowering impulses of his influences, his filmmaking soars in Dorothy. If Jigarthanda DoubleX was Subburaj’s first attempt to let his “content” modify his “form,” Dorothy is his first stab at critique, and what a critique it is!

The director establishes his aesthetic principle with his opening shot, where a cloud of dust gradually accumulates in the frame with increasing ferocity in a black-and-white wide shot of a truck and Karthi in the left corner of the frame. This “clouding” of emotions in an aggressive, toxic environment, where only certain modes of behavior are permissible, also primes one for a completely different film altogether. The expectations of a Tamil audience lean one toward a particular narrative logic and dramaturgy, but what appears as a film of heated passions over Dorothy morphs into a film of gender troubles and trans emergence. Subburaj’s subversion is laid bare in his ingeniously delayed title card, which appears only when Karthi and Subbu go to see Dorothy. Likewise, every genre dictate is subsequently inverted and subverted; even a throwaway reference to a famous Tamil film, Nayakan (Mani Ratnam, 1987), isn’t spared this inversion. Ilayaraja himself takes a leaf from Santosh Narayanan’s (Subburaj’s usual music director) book, subjecting his string-laden, orchestral music to the quirky, kitschy musical parodies that form the hallmark of Subburaj’s films. The director’s clever structure here of alternating between the present and past allows Karthi’s conflicting emotions to blossom out of the strictures of his environment, and if we, as spectators, have certain expectations, it’s because both us and our films are bound by the same strictures.

While there are some issues related to the occasional gender essentialism, tonal inconsistencies, and awkward didacticism, Dorothy is an almost perfect realization of Subburaj’s ideas and themes, a shining example of the wonder that can emerge by wading through the thicket of influences, mores, contradictions, and questions, rather than evading them. He confidently ushers the modern into the realm of his influences, aided amply by a terrific Ilayaraja, all while taking us along on an exhilarating, heart-wrenching rollercoaster of genres which willingly changes course according to the roiling emotions of its protagonists. The masala film is finally shown a mirror, with Subburaj revelling in its virtues while exposing its fragile masculinities. By doing so, Subburaj not only delineates alternative emotions and expressions lingering within oppressively hierarchical societies, but also finally unleashes the liberatory potential of the masala genre he has spent all these years working toward.