Eega, the vengeful fly: when Rajamouli reinvents the genre film (review)

Previously unpublished, Eega, the Vengeful Fly arrives in cinemas fourteen years after its release in India, in parallel with a retrospective at the Cinémathèque, dedicated to its director.

If the cinema of SS Rajamouli stands out above all for its Homeric breath (The Legend of Baahubali for example), the discovery of a previous project like Eega, the vengeful fly will help to understand how all these films display their themes with masterly seriousness. RRR was very self-consciously epic, in the same way that Eega sets a seriously tragic tone (Nani loves Bindu, but the rich Sudeep murders her) before veering into an equally diligent revenge tale. And at that moment, when the film decides to be funny, it goes all out: Nani is reincarnated as a fly and harasses her assassin in every possible way – we see her muscle up using a multitude of small objects, the better to attack him in the face. And we then witness this revenge from two different scales (human, and from the insect’s point of view), this alternation offering Rajamouli the possibility of doubling his inventiveness, both visually and comically.

Taking the opposite view of an entire imagination specific to cinema (largely dominated by The Fly by David Cronenberg), SS Rajamouli offers a much more optimistic outcome for his characters. So, when he has become a fly, Nani allies himself with Bindu, who was the first to understand what happened to his former neighbor. The film then escapes a certain fate and stages a complicit solidarity between two beings attracted to each other, beyond the shape of their bodies. A path is thus invented that is both sinuous and singular, which reinvents the genre film, and with it, a certain idea of ​​romanticism.

By SS Rajamouli. With Sudeep, Nani, Samantha Ruth Prabhu… Duration: 2h14. Released June 28, 2026