Virupaksha (2023) on Netflix
NR20232h 26mActionDramaMystery
Rudravanam's villagers lynched a couple for black magic, and the dying wife cursed the village. Twelve years on, Surya returns with his mother, meets Nandini, and deaths terrify Rudravanam.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/107,434 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Venkata Chalapathy and his wife are lynched in Rudravanam in 1979 by villagers who believe their rituals caused a run of deaths. As she dies, the woman curses the village with destruction within twelve years. Surya returns to Rudravanam with his mother Anasuyamma in 1991, when she means to donate land for a school and the village holds its carnival for the deity Modamamba. He meets Nandini, the daughter of the village head. A missing villager, Siddhayya, returns covered in pox and dies inside the temple's inner sanctum. The head priest calls the village desecrated and orders it sealed for eight days. Surya, allowed to leave because he has been away so long, goes back in with Nandini's medicine and cannot get out again.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Virupaksha (2023)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Karthik Varma Dandu's idea for Virupaksha came in 2016–17, after he read about a Gujarati woman accused of practising black magic who was stoned to death by villagers; he pictured a version where she really did have powers and cursed the village.
- Filming stopped for 22 days in September 2021 after lead actor Sai Dharam Tej was injured in a serious bike accident; he went through speech therapy and dance classes during rehabilitation, and Karthik Varma used the break to refine the script and storyboard.
- Editor Naveen Nooli suggested dropping the song "Kalallo" just three days before Virupaksha's release, believing the film would play better without it; Sukumar agreed and the song was removed from the final cut.
- The village's water bodies were laid out to look like eyes when seen from above, and the abandoned house was given two windows that also read as eyes, echoing the film's eye-contact theme; cinematographer Shamdat suggested adding a second water body to strengthen the effect.
- Samyuktha Menon, chosen to play Nandini, did not speak Telugu when she was cast, so she hired a tutor to learn the language and make her performance authentic.
- Instead of using pre-made 3D models, the team built the film's crows, which were important to the story, from scratch with a computer graphics supervisor, keeping full control of the rigging and texturing.
