Awe: The Telugu Film That Handles LGBTQ+ Representation, Our Culture of Silence, and Hope

Padma (she/her)

TW: mentions of mental illness, suicide, sexual abuse 

When I first heard about Awe, I was shocked that it existed. I was doing extensive research in a bout of curiosity to find a queer, Telugu movie, and, at last, found one. Queer representation in Indian movies has been quite limited, and the ones that exist are typically in Hindi, India’s most popular language. I wanted to know if I could find a film in my mother tongue, and stumbled upon Awe! (or అ).

However, the Awe isn’t actually a “queer film.” The story is a multi-genre character study and just so happens to include LGBTQ+ characters. Containing a cafe, library, and restaurant, the entirety of the story takes place in a mystical “food court.” Anything seems to be possible in the food court—magic, time-travel, demons, and talking animals—as we follow many different characters existing in the same moment in time. Anything is possible because (**spoilers ahead**) the final act reveals that everything is happening in the mind of the true main character, Kali, who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). 

Kali contemplates her life as she sits in a restaurant. Photo courtesy of Netflix. 

At first, I was taken aback by such a typical Hollywood, silly plot twist that reveals an outdated term (Multiple Personality Disorder) as the explanation for the wild things happening in the food court. But, upon a re-watch, I realized that this ending actually provided the director with a technique to create an interesting story, one with characters that are portrayed progressively. 

For example, one storyline in the food court involves a girl, Radha, introducing her partner to her parents. Unbeknownst to her parents, she is dating a woman named Krish. Although stereotypical gender roles and sexism are baked into the scene (the mom has taken a vow of silence, and Radha’s father takes over the conversation), the set-up allows for typical Indian light-hearted humor. Her father consistently tells Radha, 

“I’m open-minded, but your mother wants to know, what’s his job?” 

“I’m open minded, but your mother wants to know, what’s his caste?” as her mother sits in silence. 

The humor is elevated as Radha tries to explain the good qualities of the partner her parents are about to meet, as each quality gets disproven in real time. 

“They’re always on time!” [Krish will be late] 

“They’re so polite” [Krish swears] 

Although this moment turns sour, with homophobia spit at Radha and Krish, the inclusion of light-hearted humor and classic jokes actually improves the scene and allows the audience to view Radha and Krish the same as any other odd couple. 

The humor continues–for example, Radha’s girlfriend eats meat very sloppily in front of her vegetarian parents, who remain in shock. The scene implies that her girlfriend’s egregious manners are the real reason her parents are upset, not the fact that she’s a woman. With so many characters and sub-plots in the movie, we have to wait to see what happens with this scene as we move on to another, giving the audience, who may not be used to seeing Women Loving Women (WLW) on screen, time to digest what they just watched.

Meanwhile, another plotline portrays a Janitor named Shiva, who has an interest in science, working on a strange device. We learn that Shiva is working on a time machine, and as he works on it, an old woman, Parvati approaches him, strangely knowing everything about him. She finally reveals that she is him from the future. The future Parvati says to her past self, “You’ve always known you were a girl,” but doesn’t explain further. Without using any direct terms, the film tells us that Parvati is transgender. Although Shiva is reluctant, the situation with the time machine captures the attention much more than Parvati's identity. The inclusion of a transgender character was done very easily, and with all of the wacky events happening in the food court, this wasn’t particularly out of place. The audience has so many pieces to put together that a transgender character didn’t feel all that strange or like their gender identity was something to focus on. She was just there. The story once again progresses to the next character in the food court. 

Awe does a beautiful job of easily weaving in these forms of representation while keeping the audience on their toes, trying to understand what is actually happening in the food court. And even upon my re-watch, knowing the twist about Kali having DID, not everything made sense. 

Are these characters Kali’s alters? Do they exist in some reality? Are they all her, or just some of them? Did these events truly happen? 

The director, Prashanth Varma, when asked about his movie in an interview, bluntly said, “I don’t explain my films,” leaving these questions unanswered. His answers in the interview come off as arrogant, but I think the non-answer made the movie much more interesting to piece together. Personally, I believe that these characters are representations of Kali that she has embodied during her life. We don’t get to see what actually happened during her life, but we get to see her personalities and behaviors through the characters. They just all remained in her head simultaneously. 

I’m no stranger to voices in my head. I experienced a very surreal, scary psychotic episode about two and a half years ago. So, I related heavily to many aspects of this film with Kali struggling to hold herself together as her mind went in a million different directions that she couldn’t control. 
It is very hard to convey any experience of an altered mental state. The director visualizes the unvisualizable, the interactions of personalities inside someone’s mind. Although Varma decided to include a shot of Kali’s medical history saying “Multiple Personality Disorder,” I thought that the film didn’t need to include that at all; it was just a mechanism for viewers to have some sort of answer to what they witnessed. The reality is that DID/Multiple Personality Disorder is not an acceptable resolution to the events of the film in a practical sense. In reality, people experiencing this disorder wouldn’t have their personalities/alters interacting with each other. There are unexplainable things that happen throughout the movie, too, like the magic and the talking animals. Including the shot of “Multiple Personality Disorder” was merely a simple explanation for a lay audience. It was a vehicle to explain his message about mental health. Kali and the characters in her mind don’t just represent mental illness, symptoms of a psychotic episode, or DID; they represent everyone. 

We all have different sides of us taking the wheel as we live life, from our lazy ones to our ambition ones, our curious ones to our focused ones. All these characters/personas were coping mechanisms that Kali needed to digest her trauma, but these are all aspects of any human life. The film asks us, anyone, how do our personalities, our coping mechanisms, and our sides that have both helped us and hurt us throughout our life interact with each other? What do they do for us, and what can we do for them?

Unfortunately Kali had a bad ending. The film ends with her killing herself, committing “mass murder” by ending the lives of all of the characters/versions of herself. Although this may fall into the trope of bad endings and death for LGBTQ+ characters, I do feel like her death had a purpose beyond negativity for its own sake. The director warns of many societal issues throughout the film, and shows us what happens to all people if we do not address them. 

During the scene with Radha and Krish, it is revealed to Radha’s parents that she (and also the main character, Kali) was sexually abused throughout her childhood. Her girlfriend even explains, “If she was able to talk about it, it wouldn’t have gotten this bad,” as she describes how therapy and support helped Radha. Varma warns us about what can happen if we don’t address issues such as mental health and sexual assault openly. We can’t live in a society where we suppress our emotions, and our traumas. If things were better, maybe the main character would have lived.

However, Varma provides us with hope, too. The director encourages us to focus on the good sides of us: the curious child, the support system, the parts of us that want to try. Kali admits, “The good tried to save me while the evil tried to torture me.” 

When Kali utters, “I am going to commit mass murder,” Varma explains the true depths of suicide. When one ends their own life they are ending a cast of personalities. That curious child. The hopeful worker. The therapist. Maybe we owe ourselves life because everyone inside of us deserves to live. We have to battle addiction, arrogance, and fear–our negative coping mechanisms–and instead have to focus on Radha and Khris’s strategy of slow, careful rehabilitation and being open about our struggles and trauma. 

However, Varma admits through the final suicide of Kali that the answer isn’t always that simple. No matter how much we try with self-help, without addressing underlying, systemic problems in society, there will always be victims. 

Being in a unique position to relate to many aspects of the main character of the film, I was extremely delighted with the representation in Awe and how the film portrayed mental illness and LGBTQ characters, all while being in Telugu. The subtle inclusion of both queer and trans characters, who represent just parts of a whole, was refreshing and perhaps one of the best ways to introduce queer and trans representation to Indian media. More importantly, I was impressed with the ability to do so in a way that portrayed a message that was greater than any individual person; Varma speaks to society, pleading us to be better, to be open, and to battle the culture of silence, a message we all need to hear.