Left to right: Leela, Shilpa, Arputham, Jyothi, Vaembu, and Mugil. Not shown: Soori, Mohan, Gaaji, Vasanth, Thuyavan, Rasukutty, Berlin, Idi Amin's gang, Jyothi's relatives, the corpse, the alien girl, or the broken TV
Super Deluxe is a 2019 Tamil-language Indian movie, the second film by director Thiagarajan Kumararaja, starring an Ensemble Cast of Vijay Sethupathi, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Fahadh Faasil, Ramya Krishnan, Mysskin, and Gayathrie, among many, many others.
The overall plot involves an unhappily married wife, a transgender woman trying to connect with her wife and child, five teenage boys who try to watch a porn movie, a former porn actress, a tsunami-survivor who is now a Christian preacher, a sleazebag policeman, a corpse, a local gangster named Idi Amin, a girl who turns out to be an alien, and plenty more characters, plus a broken TV. It Makes Sense in Context.
This movie provides examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: There are characters with ordinary names like Leela, Jyothi, and Shilpa, and they coexist with more unusual names like Vaembu and Mugil and a cop called Berlin.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Leela asks her husband Arputham (formerly known as Dhanasekharan): "You became a Christian because you were saved from the tsunami by clutching onto a statue of Jesus. What would you have become had you been saved by clutching onto a teddy bear?". He is left speechless.
- Arranged Marriage: Between Mugil and Vaembu.
- Atomic F-Bomb: When Mugil opens the fridge to see the dead body with no warning. See Cluster F-Bomb below.
- Black Comedy:
- During the opening titles, Vaembu randomly calls up an ex-boyfriend from her college days and spontaneously invites him over. When the titles finish, they're seen having sex. A minute later, the boyfriend dies right in her marital bed.
- She hides the dead body inside the fridge before her husband Mugil comes home, intending to warn him before he sees it. But by the time he returns, some neighbors have shown up and she doesn't get a chance to forewarn him. When he opens the fridge and screams FUUUCK, the neighbor kid starts repeating it too.
- Then Vaembu and Mugil must engage in a farce to get the boyfriend's dead body out of their apartment without the guests or neighbors seeing the dead body. This includes using a cleaver to threaten a nosy kid into staying silent.
- Then they have very touching and meaningful discussions in the SUV about why they never clicked as a couple, overseen by the dead body from the back seat. The framing shows the dead body presiding over the two like a silent marriage counselor.
- The boys spend a lot of time planning and executing their porn-watching escapade, carefully making it appear they've gone to school and systematically procuring money, food and a porn movie. Then on starting the movie they find out that the porn star is the mother of one of the boys.
- The TV is broken by one of the boys, angry at seeing his mother as a porn actress. Instead of fessing up, they choose to replace the TV before the adult comes home in the evening to find a broken TV. To get the money, they end up approaching a local gangster for any jobs they might do. Before they know it, they are asked to kill a man by poisoning his drink. Not only does that backfire, but as fallout they also accidentally break the gangster's TV and now need to buy two TV sets.
- Body in a Breadbox: Vaembu stuffs her dead boyfriend in a fridge. Her husband finds it. Played for black comedy.
- Brick Joke: The boys eventually buy a new TV and discard the old TV onto a building rooftop, then go to watch a porn movie in the theater. Much drama happens to other characters after that: a man in a crisis of faith breaks a statue and finds diamonds to pay for his son's medical expenses, a woman finds the son she lost on the way home, and a corrupt policeman blackmails a married woman into giving him sexual favors. As he is approaching her to rape her and she is weeping helplessly, the broken TV falls on his head and kills him.
- Cast Herd: There are some crossovers of characters between the four different threads but they mostly interact with their own group.
- Cluster F-Bomb: Played for comedy. The neighbor kid hears the word "fuck" screamed by Mugil (see Atomic F-Bomb above) and starts repeating it incessantly. His adult relatives don't know what it means.
- Crisis of Faith: Arputham is suffering from one at the start of the film. We later find out why: he ran into Shilpa while she was terrified at having lost Rasukutty and she told him that she had tried to kill herself in the tsunami, but survived because she held on to a rock ("just a rock, Father"). Arputham, whose conversion to Christianity was motivated by the fact that he survived the same tsunami due to having held onto a statue of Jesus, was left to struggle with the fact that his survival may not have been divinely ordained after all.
- Curse: When Shilpa returns to the police station to report Rasukutty as missing, she unfortunately runs into Berlin, who savagely beats her up after she refuses his demands for sexual favours a second time, first for being a "whore" who lost her son, and then for "deceiving" him after he accidentally pulls her wig off and discovers that she is trans. When she retaliates, several policemen enter and hold her back, after which sheplaces a curse of death on him. This curse comes good when, near the end of the movie, as he is approaching Vaembu to rape her, the broken TV from the boys' story falls on his head.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Astonishingly, for all the crap they go through, every single major character gets a happy ending. Shilpa finds Rasukutty at home and, having realised that her wife and son truly love her, decides to stay. The boys are able to buy the new TV with the money they get from the alien girl, dispose of the broken TV and go to watch the porn film in the theatre. Soori is treated using the money from the diamonds found in the Jesus statue and he reconciles with Leela. And Vaembu and Mugil are able to dispose of the corpses of both Berlin (who died due to the aforementioned broken TV falling on his head, no less) and her boyfriend, and their relationship is far more open and honest whether or not they go through with the divorce.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: One for the teens & the TV, one for Vaembu & Mugil, one for Leela & family, and one for Shilpa. See Simultaneous Arcs below.
- Foreshadowing:
- When Shilpa meets Arputham in the subway after having lost Rasukutty, he reassures her that Rasukutty has most likely simply gone home. Guess where Rasukutty is finally found?
- Hyperlink Story: The four Simultaneous Arcs look completely unconnected at first, then they meet up one by one, and their crises and resolutions cross paths.
- Ironic Name: Dhanasekharan ("Bearer of Wealth") struggles to find money for his son's medical expenses, and in his current name as Arputham ("Miracle") he is unable to bring about divine intervention to save his son. Also see Meaningful Name below.
- I Was Young and Needed the Money: Zigzagged, in that the typical shame associated with the phrase is absent. In the end, when Leela and Soori talk about the porn film she was in, she says she did it in hopes of becoming an actor, knowing fully well what the role involved; she refutes Soori's supposition of her having been conned into it.
- May the Farce Be with You: Vaembu and Mugil are engaged in a total farce to smuggle the boyfriend's dead body out of their apartment without anybody noticing. They accidentally drop it down a stairwell. Cue an Indianized version of the Star Wars theme while the body falls in slow motion; the theme is on Youtube
. - Meaningful Name: Arputham ("Miracle") chose his name after attributing his surviving the tsunami to a divine miracle. Shilpa ("stone", "statue") is saved from the tsunami by holding onto a large rock, though she seems oblivious of the connection. Her birth name is Manickam ("Gemstone"). Arputham rejects Shilpa's plea for forgiveness, then breaks his own stone statue in a rage to find diamonds and other gemstones inside. Also see Ironic Name above.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Shilpa is haunted by an incident during her time in Mumbai where she, desperate for money, unwittingly transported two young boys into the city, only to discover them a month later begging at a traffic signal missing an eye and a limb. It comes up most strongly when Rasukutty goes missing, and she is terrified that she is being targeted by Laser-Guided Karma. She considered herself so unforgivable that she tried to kill herself in the tsunami, but survived it due to her instinctively holding on to a random rock.
- Out with a Bang: Vaembu's boyfriend, a minute after the opening titles.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: There are run-of-the-mill scumbag cops, and then there is Berlin, who first forces Shilpa into oral sex, then blackmails Vaembu for sex.
- Simultaneous Arcs: Four stories being told in parallel, though Shilpa's arc takes place chronologically before the other three.
- Stupid Crooks: To earn money to buy a TV, Gaaji, Vasanth and Thuyavan accept a job from a local gangster to poison a specific victim (or so they think). After poisoning his tea, they get the sudden idea that if they save the victim instead of killing him, then the grateful victim would pay them more than what the gangster was paying them to kill him. Unfortunately for them, the "victim" turns out to be the gangster's henchman who was specifically evaluating whether the trio could be relied upon, and they all earn themselves a beating from the gangster.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Vaembu impulsively cheats on Mugil with her college boyfriend in her marital bed because she was forced into an arranged marriage with him and they never clicked emotionally as a couple. Mugil, unusually for this trope, is portrayed sympathetically too, and they are able to have a frank discussion of the problems in their marriage and what they should do, all while in the process of disposing of the boyfriend's dead body. See Black Comedy above.
- Title Drop: Apart from the title sequence itself, where the name shows up on a TV in one of Vaembu's neighbors' apartments, the title randomly shows up just a few minutes before the end as a large neon sign, signifying the name of a nearby hotel, as two characters talk in the foreground.
- Trans Tribulations: Played very straight as shown here. Practically everyone whom Shilpa runs into turns out to be a transphobe: the constable who thinks she is a kidnapper, the subinspector Berlin who forces oral sex from her, the people at the school who refers to her as "it", the kids at the school who taunt her with transphobic slurs, the school principal who is embarrassed by her very presence. Even the old woman who sympathizes with her plight only makes excuses for reality being different from Shilpa's expectations without offering her any encouragement. It's a major reason why she buys a ticket to return to Mumbai before realising that her wife and son truly love her for who she is.
- Word Salad Title: It is unclear why the movie is named "Super Deluxe". While the movie does show the existence of the Super Deluxe hotel nearby, it is never relevant to the plot.
