Balaji Tharaneetharan's third film with the actor turns a child's panic into an 1980s-set redemption story that early reviews call among his most assured work yet.
A gangster named Baththa gets locked inside a school toilet by a child during summer holidays. That's the entire premise Balaji Tharaneetharan builds his new Tamil film around, and going by the reaction out of early screenings, it's enough.
Baththa, set in the 1980s, reunites Tharaneetharan with Vijay Sethupathi for the third time after their work together on Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom and Seethakathi. Sethupathi plays the title character, a feared rowdy whose entire world shrinks to the size of a locked bathroom once little Sabari, played by newcomer Master Sai Prithviraj, ends up trapped in there with him.
In her review for The News Minute, Subha J Rao calls the film a story of love and redemption, built around two people separated by age and power who come out of a single afternoon changed. She writes that Tharaneetharan does his familiar trick here, showing you one thing while the real payoff sits somewhere else entirely, down to a title card she says rewards close attention later in the film.
The review singles out Sai Prithviraj as the surprise of the cast, a child actor whose fear reads as fear and never tips into anger, which is apparently what makes Baththa's arc land. Rao writes that the film's late reveal of why a gangster even wandered into a shut school gives the whole thing a different shape in hindsight, and that a scene of Baththa feeding the boy tender palm fruit under a tree is one she expects to stick with viewers.
The supporting cast includes Lijomol Jose as Baththa's wife Kannima, Hari Krishnan and Santhy Balachandran as Sabari's parents, Baby Sahasra Shree as Baththa's daughter, and Deepa Venkat, whose screen time Rao says she wanted more of. Sai Abhyankkar scores the film, and the review flags the background score as a step up from his louder work before, though it questions whether the sound fully sits inside an 80s setting. The one complaint on record: a drunk song the reviewer felt the film didn't need as a crutch, given how taut the Baththa-Sabari scenes already are without it.
Online chatter around the release has mostly stayed in review-megathread territory, with posts pointing people toward theatres and discussing Rahul Sankrityan's comments on how the film reworks Sethupathi's image and genre expectations around him. None of that has hardened into a consensus beyond the trade yet.
What happens next is the usual arithmetic. A Vijay Sethupathi film riding strong word of mouth out of the gate tends to build through its first weekend rather than open big, and Baththa's test will be whether a story this small in scale can hold a theatre's attention once the novelty of the premise wears off. The numbers over the coming days will say more than any review can.
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