Serious Men is actually based on Manu Joseph’s novel carrying the same name. It is directed by Sudhir Mishra and gives us a satirical and sharp look at ambitious India. Ayyan Mani is Tamil Dalit who lives in Mumbai slum with his family and represents an Indian who wants a better life and can do anything to achieve it whether right or wrong.
However, Ayyan is also doing something else which we discover later on. He is creating a destructive weapon in the form of his intelligent school-going son Adi played by Aakshath Das. The child slays principal and teachers with his astounding math solving abilities. Good education can help in building a complete individual and if someone is lucky enough it also helps in breaking class and caste barriers.
Ayyan plays his victim card with intelligence with the right degree and in the right place, which takes you very far with him. Adi’s surprising skills attract media attention who are in search of new and quick sensation whom they can address as a slum child, lower caste or a prodigy. Few smart politicians in order to build their Dalit base promise to take people out of their chawls and give them flats by publicising Adi.
Everything is going on with the course until something happens and the serious men have to break the building blocks they have been giving out to people. Once the secret between Ayyan and Adi is out before people, Ayyan tries to control the damage. He, however, does not understand the pressure the young boy is facing deep inside his heart.
Aakshath is perfect as Adi in the movie and is the major highlight in the whole cast. The effective parts of the movie revolve around these three characters and the rest includes characters in the institute where Ayyan works and the party office of politician father and daughter played by Sanjay Naverkar and Shweta Basu Prasad which is somewhat unclear but the actors fit in their roles to the core.
We can see Sudhir Mishra back in form through this film. He is one of the few Hindi filmmakers who can understand politics very well and spins the story around present-day politics which we have previously seen in Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi. HKA was set in 1992 Dharavi background where an individual looks out for his existence and a similar theme is visible in Serious Men.
In Serious Men we see a slum dweller having an ambition of living a quality life and if he is unable to achieve his ambition in the right way then the only way is to snatch it by doing wrong. Ayyan Mani is the actual serious man of the movie. Serious Men is already streaming on Netflix since 2nd October.
