A 15-year-old girl was attacked with a chainsaw inside her classroom in Andhra Pradesh. The brutality of the attack shocked people across the country. 

After the initial shock, another conversation started. Many began pointing to films such as Animal, KGF and Pushpa, where extreme violence is presented as an expression of masculinity, anger and power.

And then came a response from the overlord of alpha-male cinema, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga.

He said that when a horrific crime takes place, the first response should be empathy for the victim. He accused critics of using the incident as an opportunity to target filmmakers and said cinema was being made a scapegoat.

Watching a movie with violence alone does not automatically make someone violent. There is little evidence to establish such a direct cause-and-effect relationship.

But that is also a rather simplistic way of looking at the criticism. Because the question is not just whether films make people violent. It is about what kind of violence we are normalising, what kind of masculinity we are celebrating, and what happens when brutality is repeatedly presented as an expression of love, anger and heroism.

And people like Vanga have to be open to this criticism.

Let Me Explain.

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Produced by Megha Mukundan, script by Dhanya Rajendran, story by Jahnavi, edited by Nikhil Sekhar ET, camera by Ajay