Funky Movie Review & Rating: Anudeep KV built his reputation on the gleefully random comedy of Jathi Ratnalu, where logic took a backseat to pure, silly fun. His latest, Funky, tries to channel that same energy into a behind-the-scenes look at filmmaking, but the result is all over the place and only occasionally hits its mark.
Funky is essentially a film about making a film, also called Funky. Here, a film production spirals so wildly out of control that the man funding it ends up in a hospital bed. Our protagonist, Komal (Vishwak Sen), is making a movie that’s leaking money. When the financial disaster becomes a medical emergency for the producer, his daughter Chitra (Kayadu Lohar) steps in with the business mindset her father clearly lacked. Her diagnosis? The director is the disease, and amputation is the only cure. The core conflict emerges from Komal’s battle to retain control of his vision while Chitra attempts to rescue her family from bankruptcy.
Vishwak Sen clearly wants this to work. You can feel his commitment as he attempts to recapture the comedic sensibilities that marked his early career. The problem? Whatever natural timing he once possessed seems to have eroded over time. Watching him labor through punchlines that should feel effortless becomes its own kind of uncomfortable spectacle. The jokes land with a thud more often than a bang, and no amount of energetic mugging can compensate for fundamentally broken comic rhythms.
Kayadu Lohar, on the other hand, emerges as one of the film’s genuine assets. Her Chitra reads as refreshingly pragmatic in a sea of chaos, she’s not there to be rescued or romanced, just to stop a financial hemorrhage. Lohar plays her with a steely competence that grounds the wilder elements swirling around her. In a better film, her performance would anchor the story; here, she’s stuck trying to hold together something that’s fundamentally falling apart.
Anudeep KV’s signature absurdist humor does land with regularity. His specialty, those wonderfully stupid one-liners that catch you off-guard, provides enough little to less laughs to prevent the film from becoming a total slog. When everyone’s committed to the bit, embracing the silliness without self-consciousness, the comedy clicks.
If there’s a single element that most thoroughly sabotages Funky, it’s the editing. Comedy depends on precise calibration, you need to understand when to hold on a beat, when to cut away, how to build momentum across sequences. Scenes end abruptly, transitions jar you out of moments that were working, and the pacing lurches between sluggish and frantic with no middle ground. It’s the kind of choppy assembly that makes you wonder if anyone watched it all the way through before declaring it finished.
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Bheems Cecirolio’s musical contributions provide occasional relief, injecting energy when the narrative can’t generate its own. Suresh Sarangam’s camera work at least ensures everything looks visually vibrant, even when what’s happening on screen makes little sense.
Here’s what really stings: Funky had the raw materials for genuinely incisive commentary about the film industry. The premise practically hands you opportunities to explore creative compromise, financial pressure, ego warfare, and the tension between art and commerce. These are rich veins waiting to be mined. Instead, Anudeep barely acknowledges them. We get one-liners about budget overruns and creative differences, many which barely land. The film gestures toward satire but never actually commits to it, settling instead for silly jokes.
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The meta-framework, a film about making a film, could have been cleverly deployed. Instead, you keep waiting for the layers to fold into each other in interesting ways, but they never do. The movie was graced by film’s producer Naga Vamsi, director Harish Shankar, film producer Dil Raju, and so many more. No amount of cameo appearances from the industry could save it though.
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Strip away the jokes (most of which don’t work anyway), and what you’re left with is… not much. There’s no real story here, just a series of situations loosely connected by having the same characters wander through them. No momentum builds, no stakes escalate, no emotional journey unfolds. It’s a sketch show masquerading as a feature film, and the disguise doesn’t hold.
The film seems to think its premise alone is sufficient, that simply being “about filmmaking” grants it inherent interest. But premises aren’t stories, they’re starting points. You still need to actually construct something, to build narrative architecture that gives audiences a reason to stay invested. Funky never bothers with that construction work.
Anudeep KV needs to decide whether he wants to grow as a storyteller or simply repeat variations of his previous success. Vishwak Sen needs material that actually plays to his strengths rather than exposing his weaknesses. And audiences deserve comedies that understand the difference between being random and being funny.
