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Dorothy (2026) · ⭐⭐⭐½ (3.5/5)

Dir. Karthik Subbaraj · Starring Keerthy Suresh, Sananth, Rishikanth, Muthukumar · 146 min · Tamil

Streaming: Netflix from 23 Oct 2026 · in theatres now

*

The setup: In 1980s Madurai, Karthi and Subbu become inseparable as boys — Subbu the scrappy one who throws the punches, Karthi the gentle one who cannot stand the sight of blood — and grow up side by side as henchmen under Subbu's father, Whistle Veeraiah. Then Subbu's elder brother brings home a wife: Dorothy. She is warm, she is kind to both of them, and she becomes the one person in that house Subbu can actually talk to. When Dorothy is found dead in the family barn — the police wave it through as suicide, though Veeraiah's arm is marked with blood — the family loses the only soft thing in it, and the way they choose to deal with what comes next is the entire subject of this film.

The verdict: a good film about a sensitive subject, and it handles that subject with real care.

What impresses most is the refusal to be clever at the expense of the character. A lesser film would treat this material as a twist to be sprung, a reveal that recontextualises everything for a gasp in the third act. Karthik Subbaraj does not do that. The subject is never the punchline and never the shock — it is a person, and the camera stays with her as a person. Anyone who has seen how Indian cinema usually handles this material will recognise how rare that restraint is. It is the difference between a film that is about someone and a film that is about an idea of someone.

Sananth carries the hardest arc in the film, and he does it largely without dialogue in the stretches that matter most. The performance has to move through grief, self-recognition, humiliation, exile and finally something like peace, and it never once plays for pity. Keerthy Suresh, in the title role, is the film's warm centre — she has relatively little screen time, but the whole emotional logic of the story rests on her, and she makes Dorothy the kind of person whose absence you feel in every scene after she is gone. Rishikanth's Karthi is the film's most difficult part: an instrument of violence who is slowly, unwillingly dismantled by his own conscience. Watching him fail to do the thing he was raised to do is where the film quietly does its best work.

The craft is a real asset. Tirru's camerawork gives 1980s Madurai a lived-in, sun-bleached texture without turning it into period-costume nostalgia, and Ilaiyaraaja's score — his first for Subbaraj — lends the film a classical Tamil register that makes the story feel older and heavier than its release date. It is also worth noting that this is Subbaraj deliberately stepping out of his comfort zone after Petta, Mahaan and Jigarthanda DoubleX. The energy that usually runs through his films is dialled almost all the way down here, and that is a choice, not a failure.

That restraint is also where the second half costs you. The film slows noticeably once the story shifts into its road-and-refuge stretch, and there are long passages where the plot is not really advancing — Karthi driving, thinking, failing to act, driving again. I think that slackness is largely expected with material this sensitive. The film has to sit inside the aftermath instead of cutting away from it, and the introspection is the point: you cannot rush a man into understanding something he has spent his whole life being taught to hate. Still, understanding why a film is slow is not the same as not feeling it, and the honest verdict is that this story could shed fifteen or twenty minutes without losing anything it needs.

The critics broadly agreed on both counts. The film premiered at TIFF in September and drew acclaim for genuinely bold, subversive storytelling — The Hindu called it Subbaraj's most audacious film and a crowning achievement. The dissents landed on the same seam: Scroll.in praised it as a terrific subversion of the conventional Tamil romance while flagging "avoidable bloat and some overwrought patches of scripting," and Anupama Chopra, appreciative of the cast, music and craft, found the sharp narrative turns and the central twist inorganic, preventing every idea from landing. The representation itself drew a polarised response, which tells you the film is doing something rather than nothing.

Bottom line: Dorothy is a good film about a sensitive subject, and it treats that subject with a seriousness it has earned. Sananth and Keerthy Suresh are excellent, Ilaiyaraaja and Tirru give it real gravity, and Subbaraj's decision to aim for empathy rather than shock is the right one. The second half runs slower than it needs to — an expected cost of handling this material properly, but a cost nonetheless. Stream it when it lands on Netflix, and give it the patience it is asking for.