Vishwanath and Sons movie review: With the right actor, family entertainers can be magical. The genre does not allow the performer to hide behind stunts, VFX or mass dialogues. It strips them down to their most human self and asks the audience to connect with that. Suriya, who has spent the last decade deep inside action spectacles and larger-than-life roles, has been absent from this space for a long time.
With Vishwanath and Sons, he walks back into it with the kind of energy that fills your heart with warmth and soothes your soul. After the spectacle of Kanguva, the style of Retro and the mass of Karuppu, watching Suriya simply sit across from someone and talk about love feels like meeting an old friend you had not seen in years.
What starts as a chance meeting turns into an unlikely friendship, and then something more. The age-gap, roughly 20 years, hangs between them. The rest of the film follows Sanjay as he navigates this unexpected relationship, the complications it creates within his family, and the question of whether love that does not fit society’s template is still worth pursuing.
Suriya is the film’s anchor and easily shines in the role. This is a performance built on restraint, something he has not been asked to show in years. There are no heroic walkouts, no slow-motion fight sequences and no mass dialogues. Instead, there is a man listening to his mother talk about her dreams for him, pausing before answering a woman who just told him she loves him, and quietly sitting by his son’s hospital bed. It is one of his most mature, likeable performances in a long time. After the intensity of Karuppu and the spectacle of Kanguva, watching Suriya simply be human is a reminder of why audiences fell in love with him in the Sillunu Oru Kadhal era. He reminds you why his fans claim he is a walking green flag.
Mamitha Baiju holds her own opposite Suriya with a natural, unselfconscious energy that makes Maddy feel like a real person rather than a “quirky heroine” archetype. She is the most memorable presence in the first half and brings an emotional depth in the second half that proves she is not just charming but also capable of carrying heavy scenes. Radikaa Sarathkumar proves that she’s outstanding in every frame she occupies. Her scenes with Suriya have a warmth and ease that suggests a genuine bond between the two actors.
Raveena Tandon does what she can with a character that is underwritten compared to the others. The subplot she carries is the film’s weakest link, but that is more a writing issue than a performance one. Nasser, Sunil, Hyper Aadi, Kaali Venkat and Harsha Chemudu are all effective in their supporting roles, with the comedy track landing more often than not.
GV Prakash Kumar’s background score is one of the film’s standout elements. It is subtle when it needs to be, warm without being sweet or sentimental, and it elevates the emotional beats without drowning them. Nimish Ravi’s cinematography is clean and composed. The film has a polished, premium look without feeling over-produced.
If Vishwanath and Sons stumbles, it is not for lack of heart but for lack of a plot sturdy enough to carry it. With a geniunely heartwarming concept and the performances that deliver more than it can possibly do, the film makes a mark. But the story underneath keeps losing its footing, moving from one emotional beat to the next without the connective tissue that would make each one land harder. Tighter editing might have masked some of this, but Navin Nooli’s cuts feel unsteady, clipping comedy sequences that needed a beat or two more to land while holding on to emotional stretches that had already done their job.
The result is a film that feels like a collection of individually good scenes rather than a cohesive whole. What remains undeniable is that Venky Atluri can write. His dialogue crackles, his characters breathe, and his instinct for family dynamics is sharper than almost anyone else in South Indina cinema right now. But writing well and directing well are two different things, and Vishwanath and Sons is the film that makes that distinction most visible in his career so far.
That said, one thing Atluri deserves credit for is how he handles the age-gap between Suriya and Mamitha Baiju’s characters. A 20-year difference in a mainstream Indian film could have easily turned into either a punchline or a uncomfortable fantasy. Atluri does neither, he lets the discomfort exist without making it the whole conversation, treats both characters as adults capable of making their own choices, and never once frames the relationship as something the audience should find strange or aspirational. It is simply presented as something that happened, and the writing is mature enough to let the audience decide how they feel about it. In a film industry where age gaps between leads are either ignored entirely or played for shock value, Venky Atluri surprises you.
Vishwanath and Sons is not a perfect film. But it is also honest, well-performed, funny and emotionally rooted in a way that most mainstream family dramas simply are not in today’s age. There are no villains to fight, no worlds to save and no mass-interval blocks. The film asks you to sit with its characters, feel what they feel and leave the theatre feeling a little better than when you walked in. It mostly succeeds at that.
