According to Wikipedia, a hundred and thirty-four Hindi movies were produced and released in 2025, of which I saw thirty-eight. I only found a handful of them worth watching, and even fewer worth reviewing or recommending to anyone else. Ananth Mahadevan directed two of the three or four that I felt stood out – The Storyteller and Phule. I picked The Storyteller to review.
Phule was a biopic made with careful attention to detail and historical context. Nevertheless, it ran into controversies and censorship issues. As Cecil Day Lewis would say, “It is the logic of our times – no subject matter for immortal verse”. I will try to review this in a future post.
Synopsis
The Storyteller, the other Mahadevan movie to me was a very interesting juxtaposition of two apparently contradicting facets of a moral dilemma – the healing of the storyteller’s sense of inadequacy, and the confrontation of the listener’s moral turpitude.
Here, redemption doesn’t arrive with grand gestures; it creeps in through conversation, through the act of telling and listening. Adapted from Satyajit Ray’s short story “Golpo Boliye Tarini Khuro“, this film turns a simple premise — a man hires a storyteller to cure his boredom — into a layered reflection on guilt, vanity, and the fragile human need to be understood. It’s a film where retribution is moral, not physical, and where storytelling itself becomes the instrument of redemption.
Craft of the Storyteller
Ananth Mahadevan resists the temptation to “open up” the story unnecessarily. Instead, he leans into the theatricality of two people in a room, letting the tension rise from rhythm and silence. The direction is confident enough to let scenes breathe — no frantic cutting, no emotional underlining.
This restraint is what gives the film its power. The camera often stays still, as if it too is listening to the story as it unfolds.
Plot
Paresh Rawal plays the role of Tarini Bandopadhyay, a journalist who struggled in his career because of his inability to compromise and is eventually let go. In his friends’ company he comes alive and becomes a passionate connoisseur of the arts, politics, culture, sports – in short anything and everything you would expect from a typical middle class Bengali intellectual. He is the storyteller in this story.
He has a compelling knack for storytelling yet never satisfied with his stories enough to publish any of them. He has tasted admiration in his prime, but age, changing tastes, and his own stubbornness have pushed him to the margins.
His greatest success is his ability to read people with uncanny precision; his greatest failure is the loneliness that comes from refusing to compromise. What makes him authentic is the contradiction he embodies: a man who uses stories to hide his wounds even as he uses them to heal others, even an insomniacal businessman.
Adil Hussein plays the role of Ratan Garodia, a successful businessman who overcame a lack of education and polish through ambition and hard work. He is a self‑made figure who believes control is the only path to security. His worldview is transactional; everything has a price, even entertainment, even people. His success is material and undeniable, but his failures are internal: emotional distance, moral shortcuts, and a deep discomfort with introspection.
What makes him human is the vulnerability he tries so hard to conceal — the flicker of guilt, the longing for connection, the fear that his life’s victories may not add up to meaning.
Ratan suffers from severe insomnia. He advertises for a storyteller in the hope that listening to stories will help him sleep. On a whim, Tarini responds to the ad and is engaged as the storyteller. As the story unfolds, what begins as a transaction of words and money slowly morphs into a psychological contest. Tarini’s tales start to mirror the businessman’s own moral compromises, and the listener’s amusement turns into discomfort.
Meanwhile, Ratan is pursuing an old flame (Revathi is a special appearance). To impress her, he is quietly turning all of Tarini’s stories into bestsellers under the pseudonym “Gorky”. He instantly achieves a cult celebrity status. When Tarini realizes that he’s been played and decides to get his retribution. He begins to tell Tagore’s stories to Ratan. Not realizing that he is listening to literary classics, Ratan publishes these stories and receives an award for those stories.
At the award function he is confronted by the Tagore Foundation and accused of plagiarism. Humiliated, he ends up facing a lawsuit and paying a fine, losing the girl he was trying to impress, and losing the prestige and fan following he earned in the process.
Back in Kolkata, Tarini finally manages to confront the writer’s block that prevented him from publishing his stories. Using the pen his wife once gifted him, he writes the story of his meeting and interactions with Ratan and publishes it.
And in Ahmedabad, Ratan too turns into a real author, writing about Tarini and discovers his true self.
Unravelling of the Storyteller and the Listener
Retribution leads to redemption.
The beauty of the plot is that it doesn’t rely on twists; it relies on revelation. The more Tarini speaks, the more Ratan is forced to confront his own motives. The film’s final movement — where the story being told and the life being lived begin to blur — lands with quiet force.
What did you think about the review? Please tell us in the comments section below.
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