Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra is an Indian action film intended to kickstart a new franchise, this one doing the box-office which goes against the tide for ‘girlboss’ movies.
Its production budget of 330m Rupees (£2.8m) has so far taken 810m Rupees (£6.89m), compared to the recent Ballerina: From The World of John Wick, which cost $90m to make, and took just $136m at the box office, and given that films have to recoup up 2-3 times the production budget to clear a profit, once marketing is taken into account, Ballerina hasn’t managed that.
Chandra (Kalyani Priyadarshan) is an unlikely superhero – in the guise of a young, thicc woman, getting involved in a number of situations, because that’s what superheroes do.
She works in a restaurant by day, but when she sees Sunny (Naslen) about to get run over, she rushes in at speed and pushes him out of the way, as well as stopping a female colleague getting acid thrown at her from a ghastly man, who clearly has a button mushroom in his undercrackers.
But to get to the meat of the plot, people are getting kidnapped and having their organs harvested, for someone who leaps about a lot and punches baddies into next week, how does Chandra do this without muscles? It reminds me of Terminator Genisys, when Emilia Clarke made for the least-convincing Sarah Connor ever, as she hadn’t spent even one day in the gym in preparation!
To eek out the overlong 150-minute running time, our heroine also has a tedious backstory about how she came to be in the position she’s in, but the disappointing thing is how limp Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra really is. It doesn’t have as much action as the trailer made it seem – and even what’s there isn’t much to shout about. Plus, the occasional humour seemed misplaced when Chandra was always serious… either that, or she just always has a right face on.
However, maybe I missed out on some of the jokes, as quite a few people in the audience found them hilarious.
Bafflingly – and like another Mollywood film, Turbo – when it came to the English subtitles translating the Malayalam language, this one also self-censored some swear words. At one point, we had the obvious, “B***h!”, while earlier was a more confusing, “*****!”
Bloody annoyingly, despite reporting a problem with screen 12 in mid-June, the projector image is overscanned/’zoomed in’.
Following recent DMs, where Odeon’s customer service people had been told by the cinema at the projector’s picture problems had been fixed, that was clearly a lie.
Do I need to take a picture next time it’s about to happen? Why has no-one stood and watched while the ads go to the trailers? There’s about 5 chances a day to do that!
Basically, this is a 1.90:1 film, which should still show some element of black bars top and bottom, as it’s a 1.85:1 screen, not that you did see any of that, because the fault is still being ignored and lied about.
Maybe I should drop CEO Mark Way a line?
Screen 12 hasn’t been touched whatsoever. It’s still overscanned, so everything’s falling off the screen, as shown with things like both the “These trailers are suitable for the film“, and the Odeon slogan on the ‘Strobe Lighting’ warning screen, all of which is cut off the bottom of the screen.
Ads and trailers also had text cut off. It’s just amazing that the subtitles on Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra were high enough, so that when the image was crazily zoomed-in, they were touching the bottom of the screen.
It’s a five-minute job to fix this – if comparisons with other screens is anything to go by when the problem has happened – and it’s also slightly out of focus, too.
I did mention this on the night, TWICE, not only as the trailers were about to begin, but also in the interval. I understand that both times this would be fed back to a manager, but absolutely zip all was done to fix it. I may as well have sent word via carrier pigeon if the management don’t care.
Still, had a nice brief chat with a guy who also left around the same time, as he said he’d seen me in other films (I probably do stand out as the only white guy in the audience for an Indian action film), so we chatted for a few minutes about other Mollywood films like Turbo, although he wasn’t familiar with Bollywood when I mentioned Bade Miyan Chote Miyan from last year. I don’t see any difference between the end result of the films, although I do welcome an interval in a long film.
NOTE: There is both a mid- AND post-credits scene, and most people stayed for both, though, which is rare in the cinema.
Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra is in cinemas now, but isn’t yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD. However, once announced, it will appear on the New DVD Blu-ray 3D and 4K releases UK list.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 150 minutes
Release date: August 29th 2025
Studio: AGS Entertainment
Aspect ratio: 1.90:1 (X-OCN ST(8.6K)
cinema: Odeon Trafford Centre
Rating: 2/10
Director: Dominic Arun
Producer: Dulquer Salmaan
Screenplay: Dominic Arun, Santhy Balachandran
Music: Jakes Bejoy
Cast:
Chandra: Kalyani Priyadarshan
Sunny: Naslen
Inspector Nachiyappa Gowda: Sandy Master
Naijil: Arun Kurian
Venu: Chandu Salimkumar
Garuda Commando Chief: Aadam
Kathanar: Sunny Wayne
Prakash: Nishanth Sagar
Daniel: Vijayaraghavan
Gajendran / King: Shivajith Padmanabhan
Neeli’s mother: Nithya Shri
Murugesan: Sarath Sabha
Anu: Anna Ben
Moothon: Mammootty (voice)
Charlie: Dulquer Salmaan
Chathan: Tovino Thomas
Kadamattathu Kathanar: Sunny Wayne
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.