One of the great joys of watching a Kartik Subbaraj film is enumerating a list in your head of his possible sources of inspiration. It remains true for his latest directorial venture, Dorothy, too. Like how a home without a woman’s touch has echoes of Kanu Behl’s Titli (2013) – a film about a carjacking crew, comprising a father and his three sons. A scene where the couple bows down to touch an elder’s feet, only to cut to a marriage scene when the couple gets back up, but the man has been replaced by someone belonging to the same dominant caste as the woman. It’s the kind of deadpan comedy scene I’d expect in a modern Malayalam film. A character tries to clumsily kill someone, and repeatedly fails, reminiscent of the assassins in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2013). A black-and-white track takes place in the present, while cutting to a flashback in colour, like in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). There’s also the grit and rigour of the Madurai gangster film, championed by the likes of Vetri Maaran, M. Sasikumar, given how the film centres itself around young boys being taught to ‘man up’ each time they walk, eat or wince while seeing a floating corpse, violence. They’re also repeatedly told crying ‘like a woman’ is disgusting. Without doubt, Dorothy is the work of a film-lover. That’s, perhaps, its biggest strength. But, by the end of the film, it also seems like its most glaring limitation. Subbaraj wants to do the right thing, but there’s only so much commentary one can offer with insight derived only from movies.Spoilers ahead, you have been warned.Subbu (Sananth) and Karthi (Rishikanth) are inseparable childhood friends, despite the latter belonging to a ‘lower caste’. Subbu inducts Karthi into the world of masculinity, which he learned from his father, his two significantly older brothers, and films at the local theatre. Without a mother-figure at home, Subbu finds refuge in Karthi’s mother’s lap, who sells paniyarams for a living. Karthi, on the other hand, without a father at home – is eager for the acceptance of Subbu’s father. Whistle Viraiya (Muthukumar) is a sleazy, obstinately bigoted money-lender in town, residing in a home where women don’t survive. His wife and teenage daughter were found dead in a nearby well, with one rumoured to have been killed, and the other’s suicide abetted. As time goes by, Karthi supersedes Subbu in the drinking, cussing, misogyny and overall ease around violence. The duo is recruited by local gangster, Vadivu (Ramachandran Durairaj), who contracts them to kill an adversary. Halfway in, the sequence becomes comical, like an improvised Kashyap scene from the Wasseypur films, before reaching its bloody conclusion.Arrested after the incident, Vadivu warns the two young men to not let the world get between them. They both stare in bewilderment. What could possibly come between blood-sworn brothers? Subbu’s elder brother, after fleeing from home because of a pending investigation, returns with a wife. The film’s title appears – Dorothy. Keerthy Suresh, playing the title character, genuinely feels like an alien in that household. Subbu and Karthi can’t stop staring at her, given how they’ve spent almost no time interacting with a woman that looks like her. But it’s how Subbu describes her, which becomes the first red-herring. “She looks like a doll,” Subbu tells Karthi – an unexpectedly sweet thing, especially when one is expecting something lascivious.Subbu and Karthi’s paths begin to diverge here, as Subbu spends more time with Dorothy, much to both Karthi and Whistle’s annoyance. Subbu helps her with domestic chores, washing utensils, clothes, learning how to cook, tasks specifically meant for women according to Whistle. Is it platonic affection? Does he miss his sister? Is this romantic? The suspicion, which is funny till a point, takes a shocking turn around the interval point. It activates the film’s central reveal.Subbu hurries into a room, prompting Whistle to take notice. As he looks through the window, he screams and calls for his other sons, asking them to ‘stop’ Subbu. I wondered if he was about to kill himself. In a way, yes. Subbu always felt she was a woman caged in a man’s body. In that decisive moment, Subbu embraces his ‘real’ identity. When her family members try to stop her from leaving the house, so she doesn’t bring “shame” to them, she summons the violence that is ingrained within her, thanks to them.I think it’s till this point that Subbaraj has control over the narrative, and then gradually loses it. As Subbu’s family tries to hunt her down before the town sees her, she wanders around begging in a nearby town’s bus-stop. In an earlier scene, he’d beat up a (probably) transwoman, after she teased him about his ‘soft’ masculinity at a drinking hole. Here, Subbaraj lumps all queer identities together. Soon after, Whistle calls Karthi (who has started working as a truck driver), and tells him about Subbu’s new identity; he’s disgusted. Told to drive her up North in his truck and kill her, Karthi is given both an offer and a veiled threat. “Remember your mother still lives here,” Whistle reminds Karthi.As Karthi sets out on his mission, he finds Subbu at a bus stop of a nearby town, and tells her how he’s sickened by her. Subbu, on the other hand, after embracing her gender, acts more effeminately than before. I remember wondering if that was because this was Subbu’s real self, and she was not ‘acting’ anymore? Then she also starts flirting with Karthi. There aren’t many hints about her having feelings for him, so I wondered if she was being playful. As Karthi tries to muster up the courage to kill her, he discovers the ally in him. In a contrived moment in a highway clinic, Karthi, after surviving a scorpion bite (Subbu saves him by hoisting him on her shoulder), is startled to find a transperson beggar lying next to him. He wakes up in a jolt, to realise it’s not Subbu.Narratively, for me, the last 35 minutes of the film seemed to be in free fall. Even though we sail through most of the film because of Illayaraja’s excellent score, which seems to be shouldering a lot of the storytelling responsibility. There’s a coda portion of the film – which is competently performed and directed using mainstream flourishes, but one I found deeply faulty even within the realm of mainstream contrivance or logic. As Karthi warms up to Subbu’s new identity, and begins to think aloud, I wondered if Subbaraj’s film was too extroverted for its fragile, introverted conflict. It is great that the director is trying to normalise transidentity on screen, but watching the last half an hour of the film, I wondered if he wanted to ‘solve’ queerphobia in one go. It’s a very mainstream thing to search for bow-tied ends, providing necessary catharsis to an audience, along for the journey for 140-odd minutes. There are no ellipses (of one’s lingering prejudice, childhood conditioning), or any unsaid emotions. The opposite of hate is love. There’s little to no awkwardness, and definitely no discovery. The final scene, even though soaring in emotionality, felt self-congratulatory. I wondered if Subbaraj had gotten his idea by operating on filmy logic, instead of deliberating over its plausibility in real life.For a culture as straitjacketed as ours, the climax (however strained) in Dorothy might seem “provocative”. But it also doesn’t do much to remove the binaries in one’s thought process, especially of those who might be scandalised by Subbaraj’s film. At one point, a cop crudely tells Karthi – “If you can’t kill it, marry it.” – suggesting women/queer folks are meant just for two functions as intended by the patriarchy. In the end, I remember thinking if deep down Subbaraj’s views on women/queer folk was that much more nuanced and sophisticated than the crude cop.*Dorothy is playing in select theatres