Follower Review: The making of a troll

Harshad Nalawade라이브 바카라 Follower is an abrasive mirror of our times, where fracturing, spiteful public rhetoric hijack private resentments. Grudging personal circumstances snowball into a political battle. There라이브 바카라 no mercy or redemption, only a tightening of stances. The city of Belgaum, caught in a crossfire between Maharashtra and Karnataka, becomes the film라이브 바카라 site of plumbing communal tension. Violence is a lingering presence.

Follower opens with a death, rolling back into a saga of three friends, Raghu (Raghu Prakash), Sachin (Nalawade), and Parveen (Donna Munshi), a Muslim single mother. Hailing from an upper-class Kannada family, Sachin makes YouTube videos with a woke slant of social justice, railing against propaganda, while we watch Raghu handle social media posts for a radical outfit that purportedly upholds the Marathi community. Parveen strikes as the most sorted in the trio, seeing through any ruse and quick to disentangle herself from any condescension. Munshi is excellent in conveying a certain firmness of spirit.

Unfolding in flashback, providing depth and texture to the figuration of someone like Raghu who could just be pinned down as a troll and merely left at that, Nalawade라이브 바카라 enquiries push deeper, peering into the many fault lines that run through the Indian nation-state. He라이브 바카라 curious and attentive to how individuals journey and gather calcified notions, the gradual stretching out of friction and unease in relationships once held as deeply reliable, friends turning into bitter foes. We watch intimacy and comfort between friends blur into disgust and utter disregard, the eventual curdling of deep ties.

It라이브 바카라 a maelstrom of hate that sends cracks through friendships and relationships. Nalawade makes a brilliant, impassioned plea for how the political encroaches on the personal. An ideological thrust can leverage on personal vulnerability, weaponize it towards self-seeking, wildly manipulative agendas. The politically loaded question of migrants becomes the film라이브 바카라 hotbed, through which it ceaselessly asks who stakes a claim to a particular territory and why. Belonging itself turns into an incensed contention—the insider-outsider scuffle for sole, all-encompassing, exclusive rights and ownership animating the dynamics between the two friends. Soon, individuality bleeds out as community bludgeons its way in. Either side believes it라이브 바카라 them who have been wronged, the other at fault.

Increasingly, Raghu finds himself and his circumstances beyond rescue or hope. Nalawade maps out the trajectory with keen intelligence and compassion. We witness the full arc of an individual who edges towards intolerance. Initially, Raghu doesn’t at all subscribe to his father라이브 바카라 belief that it라이브 바카라 their Marathi roots that places them at constant disadvantage, of being perennially turned aside. His father insists, in Belgaum, the Kannada community will always be arrogated more opportunities, favors—a cushioned status. Raghu dismisses this, only to find its likelihood, its currency bearing on him with escalating force and conviction. His loneliness only drives the knife deeper.

Raghu endures multiple rejections. In spite of his engineer training, he라이브 바카라 persistently overlooked for a promotion, whereas his Kannada-speaking colleagues are chosen. A rising tide of hate takes root in him, demanding he reckon with his community라이브 바카라 marginalization. He feels beholden to do something for his people. He may think of Sachin being in the opposing camp, but both are united in their belief that they are working for a social cause. They righteously defend their work even as their families question it since it barely brings in any solid earnings.

Raghu falls under the sway of a right-wing leader. What라이브 바카라 compelling is Nalawade refusing an absolute, immediate attraction between Raghu and the radical outfit. The breakage in his circumstances, be it weathering the obligation to take over his father라이브 바카라 dreary business, a family that doesn’t seem to quite see him or value his interests, register with emphatic clarity. That he also gets jilted in love thickens his hate further, projecting a vicious, mounting rage against another individual into an entire community. Through his social media hate-spewing, he finds purpose, an energy to channel into the day—a sense of direction, an anchor. Nalawade라이브 바카라 congruent screenplay interweaves Raghu라이브 바카라 focalizing perspective along with undercutting it, as it locates a complex matrix of police violence, prejudice and Othering. For all its thematic anxieties with fixities, narrow affiliations, majoritarian reflexes, Follower achieves an effortlessly plural, democratic current that zips among Marathi, Kannada, Hindi and English.

Nalawade astutely punctures any totalising, homogenising influence. A pragmatic jab can prop up in the unlikeliest of situations. A prospective match suggests to Raghu that he might be blinded in his beliefs, casting the slippages in his rhetoric in stark view. We also glance through his moments of doubt, an impulse to detach from the right-wing leader라이브 바카라 orbit, a possibility of shedding that which is only short-lived. The way Nalawade handles this critical tipping point lends complete coherence and balance to Follower. The writer-director라이브 바카라 gaze is vastly attuned to the full array of what pushes someone to be who they ultimately become, seething and hurting and vengeful. Through Prakash라이브 바카라 performance—subtly nuanced in flashing a gradual corrosion—Follower라이브 바카라 tragedy hurtles into a full circle. This is a remarkably focused debut feature, confident in how it seeks to unpeel and castigate.