‘Skylab’ movie review: A charming tale of a peculiar village

First-time director Vishvak Khanderao’s Telugu film ‘Skylab’ is a delightful musical comedy populated with oddball characters

If doom’s day is round the corner, would we still hold on to empty pride that we derive from our wealth, education, caste or societal status? Or will it make us band together with people and hope to make a fresh start once the worst is over? Debut director Vishvak Khanderao raises these questions through the Telugu film Skylab, which is fashioned like a period musical comedy-drama. The film is a fictional tale inspired by incidents surrounding the fear of NASA’s space station Skylab crashing in Karimnagar on July 11, 1979.

The first few minutes establish why Bandalingampally is a village like none other, filled with peculiar people. Rather than taking the regular route of depicting an earthy, close-to-reality village setting, Vishvak and cinematographer Aditya Javvadi take the cinematic liberty of merging the earthiness with a carefully colour-coded canvas that bursts with bright hues, predominantly blues. Music composer Prashanth Vihari joins in to complete the other-worldly treatment with his rustic-meets-international score.

Once you soak into the milieu, it becomes easier to enjoy the languidly paced comedy drama. The characters are diverse — Gowri (Nithya Menen) who cannot write to save her life but is determined to carve an identity for herself as a journalist than live in the shadow of her father’s name, the opportunistic Dr Anand (Satya Dev) who needs money to get his revoked licence back, and ‘subedar’ Ramarao (Rahul Ramakrishna) who loathes the debt he has to deal with but the empty pride of his family’s past comes in the way of him actually getting down to any work.