The Spark (2016) on Netflix
Attackers come for five-year-old Nivi, and her father, Joseph Kuruvilla, fights them off. The quiet bakery owner in Alappuzha keeps hidden a past as a police officer in Chennai.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb7.4/1026,904 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
Joseph Kuruvilla runs a bakery in Alappuzha, Kerala, and raises his five-year-old daughter, Niveditha, whom everyone calls Nivi. He is friendly with Annie, Nivi's schoolteacher. A group of men comes for Nivi one day and Joseph fights them off, and Annie sees skill she cannot account for, so he tells her the truth. He is DCP Vijay Kumar, once a police officer in Chennai, where he looked into the case of Raji, an IT professional who had vanished. His inquiry pointed to Ashwin, son of the Labour Minister Vanamaamalai, but the minister and the Police Commissioner, Sibi Chakravarthy, say Ashwin has been missing for days. Vijay is in love with Mithra, a medical student.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Spark (2016)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The shoot of Theri was halted twice — by a strike held by the Film Employees Federation of South India and by the heavy flooding in Chennai. Poor climatic conditions in China also forced the team to abandon plans to film sequences there and shoot in Bangkok instead.
- On 15 April 2016, actor Vijay's fans caught a videographer recording the film in a Coimbatore theatre for piracy; he and two colleagues were handing an hour-and-a-half of footage to staff at the television channel Polimer TV, and the Tamil Film Producers Council sued the channel over it.
- Theri was not screened in many theatres across Chengalpet because of a profit-sharing dispute between producers and distributors, who were reluctant to buy it on a minimum-guarantee basis after big-budget Tamil films such as Lingaa (2014) lost their distributors huge sums.
- Bharathiraja refused to be part of the film, and his refusal led director Atlee to cast the veteran filmmaker Mahendran as the antagonist instead.
- Before Jackson was cast, the team had approached several Hindi actresses for her role, and all of them turned the offer down.
- At the end of June 2016, the film crossed the box-office mark that made it the first film in Vijay's career to enter the 150-crore club.
- During India's COVID-19 lockdown, members of the Tamil Nadu Police performed a parody version of the film's song "Jithu Jilladi" to create awareness and help control the pandemic.
