P.K.

P.K. is a shoddy criticism of religion. It conflates the value of all religions as something similar, assuming that the distinctions are ultimately trivial nor does it want to trudge on any specific aspect of any faith. It all comes off as trying to not teeter over any line to justify its secular humanist theming, but it comes across as rather tone deaf on why aspects of religion matter to people which makes its message feel a bit hollow. It gets especially glaring with how the core villain is a Hindu grifter who vaguely refers to a monotheistic and all I could think is "within the Hindu context who would this actually appeal to?" No doubt there's something to be said about religious grifters but I feel this tends to avoid being specific about the context they exist in. Religion is such a complex and layered thing that I think it's counterintuitive to reduce it in this way. Now obviously asking for a real examination between faiths is asking too much out of 2 hour and half long comedy film but I feel at least not portraying faith on such terms would make its conceit more palpable.

That said, I feel its conceit is still charming. It does land a lot of good jokes about humanity's relationship with god, especially when it starts treating the relationship as if it's transactional and literal. Does a lot of cute things, like the "wrong number" bit which I thing is such a great way to go against the religious grifter. While I think it has a poor representation of religion I also don't think it acts against it maliciously, there's a sense of joy within how it perceives the differences of people and their faith in that it earnestly wants to people of all faiths to be socially connected, that the line we draw between ourselves because of religion and culture is arbitrary. There's a charming simplicity to this morality that it's very wrong in how it reads religion but it's looking past that to land on what really matters, ya know? Maybe the simpleton approach is all we need in life sometimes and being caught up in the complexities of our beliefs causes us to lose the grander picture. In that sense it's why I find myself being a lot more charitable to this in spite of how badly it portrays religion. In my mind it hits the conclusion these complexities really shouldn't matter as much as they do, and perhaps it may be right.

You could argue this movie is naive in the values it perpetuates, but I don't believe moral values are bad because they're not simple to apply in real world scenarios. It's more of a question of what context we can presume these values can exist in. Here I believe it runs on a fantasy designed to be as palpable as possible and the extant you enjoy this mainly comes down to how much you're able to suspend your disbelief for that fantasy. Personally, I thought it was charming and managed to be consistently fun throughout so as a light fantasy of simplistic values, I think this is alright.