Candid Review | Shaakuntalam: This Samantha Ruth Prabhu starrer is a mediocre cash-grab movie

If you were to catalogue director Gunasekhar's Shaakuntalam in your movie library, you would probably put it in the kid's section under drama. Because this is not a movie for grown-ups. Shaakuntalam is inspired by Indian mythology, a story about love, curse and redemption. And sadly, you don't find any of those tropes in this movie. 

Shaakuntalam is a popular story about a beautiful woman who marries King Dushyanta in an unconventional way called Gandharva vivaha. However, her life takes a turn for the worse when she incurs the wrath of Saint Durvasa and gets cursed, resulting in Dushyanta losing all his memories of her.

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The curse can be broken if Dushyanta sees the ring he had given Shakuntala, but unfortunately, the ring gets lost in the ocean and swallowed by a fish. This story has so much potential for drama and emotional depth, but director-writer Gunasekhar fails to do justice to it.

The movie hopes that the audience will see a computer-generated white tiger and they would not mind the lack of any artistic merit in it. This is the time one would wish for a curse that would wipe out this movie from our memory.

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What's the point of turning a mythological story into a movie if you can't highlight its moral and philosophical ideas? Clearly, Gunasekhar himself didn't fully understand the plot and the wisdom of the story he was dealing with and made a movie that superficially hops from one incident to another without any emotional depth. And Gunasekhar hasn't even given a thought as to how to make the story of Shaakuntala relevant for the people who live in the 21st century. 

Samantha Ruth Prabhu's talents are totally wasted in this movie. She was supposed to drive the story, but she always remains in the passenger seat. For all the talks about this movie being heroine-oriented, her character lacks any agency. She is an eternal damsel in distress. Dev Mohan plays his character King Dushyanta without any serious involvement. The bad lip-syncing adds to the shame.

Even by the filmmaking standards of the bygone era, Shaakuntalam is a mediocre cash-grab movie.