Vishwanath & Sons hit theatres on 14 August 2026, timed for the Independence Day weekend, and it’s a Tamil-Telugu bilingual family drama directed by Venky Atluri, the filmmaker behind Lucky Baskhar and Vaathi. Suriya plays Sanjay Vishwanath, a successful shooter in his 40s whose life gets complicated when Mamitha Baiju’s character, Maddy, enters the picture. Radhika Sarathkumar, Nassar and Raveena Tandon round out the cast, GV Prakash Kumar composed the music, and the film runs just under two hours forty-five minutes. Going in, the pre-release buzz was already massive, with reports of the film crossing ₹300 crore in business before it even released.

Okay, now that the facts are out of the way, I need to talk about why I walked out of the theatre this happy. This is actually my first time reviewing a Tamil film, but Vishwanath & Sons pulled me in enough that I had to write about it.

This is the OG Surya. The Ghajini era Surya. The one people have been asking for, for years, and Venky Atluri clearly knew exactly what we’ve been missing. The romance, the appeal, the eyes, all of it is back. The whole film has this early 2000s energy to it, that warm, feel-good, nothing-too-heavy kind of movie, and honestly, I think we all needed one of those right now.

I’ll be honest, when the trailers first dropped I was sceptical. The age gap between Mamitha Baiju’s character and Surya’s felt like a big swing. As a longtime fan of his, someone who’s always kept such a clean image and built his reputation as the most romantic hero in the industry, I wasn’t sure how they were going to pull it off. It’s a genuinely sensitive premise, and there’s a real risk of it tipping into something uncomfortable.

But they got it right. It’s never vulgar, it’s never inappropriate, and it’s handled with such care that by the end I completely understood why they made this film. That’s not an easy needle to thread, and they threaded it.

And on top of all that, Surya reminds us what it actually means to be a gentleman. A man who protects and respects a woman, no ego about it. There’s a super macho energy to how he carries those moments, and honestly, it gave every woman in that theatre goosebumps.

Radhika Sarathkumar and Surya were the highlight for me. Their scenes together had this ease to them that you can only get from actors who genuinely know how to work off each other. It read as real, lived in, a proper mother and son. And Mamitha Baiju was perfectly cast. She keeps this wild, spontaneous energy while still holding onto an innocence that the role needed.

Musically, Pattampoochi is my favourite moment in the whole film. And the comedy timing throughout is spot on, nothing forced, nothing dragged out.

Critics have been fairly split on this one; some praised the performances and the mature handling of a sensitive storyline, others found parts of it predictable. I get where that criticism comes from, but for me the emotion and the chemistry carried it completely.

Overall, this is a must-watch. I really hope this is the start of more feel-good films like this one.