shruthi venkatesh

The story of Ramayana has lived in so many of us for so long — in grandmother’s voices, in paintings on temple walls, in that black and white box TV with vertical hold button. So when a filmmaker decides to put it on screen in 2026 at this scale, part of you just wants to lean in and believe. I wanted to lean in. I really did. And there are moments in this teaser where you can feel what the film is reaching for. The ambition isn’t in question. Neither is the sincerity. This is clearly not a film being made carelessly. Someone cares deeply about this. It’s there in the framing, in the seriousness of it all. But something isn’t quite landing yet, and I think it’s important to flag it. The attempt here is not to take down the teaser, but to be honest. Because this story, of all stories, deserves honesty. Ranbir Kapoor is a genuinely gifted actor. I love him. Always have. The issue is something harder to spell out. Ram, as most of us carry him, isn’t expressive in the conventional cinematic sense. He’s still. The stillness of someone who has nothing to prove and has always known it. What I’m seeing in the teaser feels like an actor carefully trying to suppress his urban softness, his romantic restlessness, that flirtatious boy energy. He is consciously embodying calm rather than someone for whom calm is simply the natural state. It’s a small thing, but with this character, small things are everything. Maybe I’m jutting the gun and the divine stillness will settle in the actual film. Then there’s the world the film is building around him. It looks expensive. It looks polished. But it also looks… untouched. Like a room where no one has ever actually sat down. There’s no dust, no friction, no sense that anyone has sweated or stumbled or lived in these spaces. Exile should feel like exile. A forest should have weight to it. What we’re getting instead feels more like beautiful environments that the characters have been placed into, rather than places they actually come from or belong. And that matters more here than it might in any other story. Because Ramayana isn’t placeless. It isn’t a generic myth floating in some borrowed fantasy universe. It’s rooted — in geography, in memory, in something that feels recognisably and specifically ours. When the visuals start to resemble a global fantasy template you’ve seen somewhere else before, something essential quietly slips away. Like it did in Brahmastra. The VFX didn’t serve the story. The story served the VFX. None of this means the film is lost. Teasers aren’t films. The texture can still arrive. The performances can still settle. The world can still find its own identity rather than borrowing someone else’s. But right now, it feels like a magnificent structure that hasn’t quite been lived in yet. The foundation is there. The scale is undeniable. It just needs its soul to show up.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Come Diwali, hopefully it will. #ramayana #teaser #ranbir #ranbirkapoor