Anukul (2017 TV Short) User Reviews

Worth watching!

[happy_peace_2004 · 9/10 · 7 August 2019]

The film raises interesting questions (using the Bhagvat Gita as a backdrop) about what is good? what is bad? who decides? It shows people and robots can be different shades of character, no one is fully good or fully bad. The professor leaves his cousin and robot together in one room despite knowing what the consequences could be, perhaps it was planned in the spur of the moment. At the end, it seems the robot does actually have a conscious (a heart) to make decisions. The film could have done better visually, so as to make the robot look like a human but also robotic at the same time.

Superb film...

[manjulmayanksingh · 8/10 · 25 March 2019]

Absolutely brilliant in each and every aspect... A must watch..the story mentioned in here above is of another film "Dhund" which is another good movie. Anukul is based on robots... A hindi prof hires a robot as his help during the revolution against robots.. the cousin of the prof tries harming the robot but dies leaving all his recently inherited property from an uncle to the prof....m sure people will love this film

Sadly this one struggles with realism too like many other Indian movies

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 22 March 2019]

"Anukul" is an Indian Hindi-language live action short film from 2017, so still relatively new. This one runs for 22 minutes almost and was directed by prolific filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh, who is also one of the writers here. Kinda surprising to see this short film has despite its running time no less than four writers. And yet, or maybe because of that, the outcome is very mediocre. You probably don't get sci-fi films from India that frequently, just a wild guess, I am not really too aware of the country's most picked genres by filmmakers. Here we have the story of a man who buys a robot (that strongly resembles a younger man) to help him with the work at his house. And he treats him with dignity and respect. You could argue if the title character here is really the protagonist or if his owner is. Anyway, said owner has a brother who is a loser that drinks alcohol all the time you could say. When he comes to the house the first time, he "kills" the robot. Well, the robot can be repaired and returns to the house when one day the brother reappears with some good and some bad news. Anyway, I will not spoiler the big plot twist at the end, but instead elaborate on why I think this was not a good movie. I think the general idea and plot and also the ending weren't too bad, but sadly it happens so many times that these Indian (short) films in their desperate shot at significance neglect attention to detail. Some examples: Would he really leave his brother alone with the robot after what happened the first time? Or would he let his brother in his house? The lightning / electric shock parallel felt very clumsy honestly from the storytelling perspective. By the way, also did not feel too realistic that the thunder came from one second to the next. And what was up with this inheritance? Please don't tell me his father died and everything is fixed already as the brother said and the central character does not know one bit about it. By the way, (SPOILER ALERT) I wonder what happened to science if a doctor cannot see the difference between a heart attack and an electric shock. I mean the skin clearly must show signs of that right? I am not a doctor, but I think that would be the case. Now as for the killing itself at the end, you could wonder how intentional it was from the robot butler and also from his owner and discuss subjects like moral in here. Anyway, the poster that basically says he is not human, but he is humane clearly feels fairly pretentious. Now almost everything I said is about the second half ogf the film, probably even the last third, but yeah the first half wasn't much better. Not gonna go a whole lot into detail here, but these moments when the robot and his owner discuss the difference between doing the right thing and the wrong thing and how it is linked to perspective as well as 2 or 3 other "deep" talks did not feel too authentic. Same about the piano playing, even if the soundtrack was probably still among the film's stronger sides. Another thing I found utterly pretentious were the exact words from the robot about his act of violence towards the end. All in all, you can also say the film could have needed more shades beyond two good guys and one bad guy (is this really true?) and a woman who literally adds nothing. I give this movie a thumbs-down. Watch something else instead.