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07 Aug 2026, 2:53 pm
GDN Movie Review(2 / 5) GDN Movie Review:
When the credits started rolling on GDN , and they showed pictures of the real GD Naidu, one thing became immensely clear. The effervescent, playful, curious, and wildly interesting man in the pictures did not feel like the one we saw in the film. It was the difference between seeing the full moon with your naked eye versus whatever the phone captures. Judging solely by the people he was seen photographed with, if GD Naidu’s life was a Marvel film, the critics would have bashed it for too many cameos, too many fan service moments, and just too much storytelling. What a wild ride of a life: on one hand, you were friends with Periyar, hosted Dr Ambedkar, and on the other hand, you met Golwalkar and Adolf Hitler. Madhavan is a fine actor, and he seems earnest enough to do justice to the character. But it is clear that the actor shifts to higher gears while portraying very specific dimensions of a man with a kaleidoscopic personality. And the portions he chooses to focus on, like his sense of nationalism, are arguably the least interesting aspect of GD Naidu. The artists have the freedom to interpret a character however they see fit. So, it is not that the directorial choice to focus less on GD Naidu’s engineering brilliance, his zest for Tamil Nadu’s social justice movement, and more on nationalism is the ‘wrong’ choice. It just feels like looking at a statue from the top angle might not necessarily be the most efficient way to observe and appreciate its intricacies.
Director: Krishnakumar Ramakumar
Cast: Madhavan, Sathyaraj, Jayaram, Priyamani, Dushara Vijayan
However, it is not Madhavan or the script’s refusal to probe into the mind, political beliefs, and philosophy of GD Naidu that disconnects us from the film. It is the complete lack of immersion plaguing every single department from production design to cinematography to dialogue writing that constantly gets in the way of us engaging with what is clearly an amazing real-life story. Farmers working in ankle-deep mud in the paddy fields wear the whitest, newest, crispiest look veshtis with not a drop of mud on them. The vintage cars look freshly painted and lifted off the GEE DEE Museum with a crane and dropped onto the set just seconds before the camera started rolling. Every time the actors are inside a room, the interiors look so artificial that we half expect them to lean on a wall, only for it to quickly fall over to reveal a soundstage. Every time you think the film looks artificial, it unlocks different levels of artificiality w
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