Progressive Mask, Regressive Portrayal: Why ‘Hot Spot 2 Much’ Is Pure Ragebait

Director Vignesh Karthik’s style of filmmaking has always been shock-inducing (not in a good way). He employs a strategy by taking up sensitive issues for the amusement of applause under the cloak of sparking conversations around them, only to end up being grossly problematic. ‘Hot Spot 1’ was nothing but that. ‘Hot Spot 2 Much’ is no different. 

After the recent misogynistic rant by Telugu actor Sivaji, moral policing of women actors on how to dress to be seen as “respectable” or to be branded with slurs, stating that beauty lies in wearing sarees or other fully covered clothes, rather than showing one’s ‘saamaan’ (assets). Director Vignesh comes up with his own version of this rhetoric on the silver screen.

Baskar (played by Thambi Ramaiah) in the short ‘Black and White,’ does a similar long rant to his own daughter (Sanjana Tiwari) on what to wear and why women’s choice of clothes is a no from him and society. He is old-school, afraid of freedom of choice, stigmatises women for drinking and for being bold enough to speak up, stand up for their rights, and address casual misogyny, patriarchy, and casteism at home.

This isn’t even the only recent portrayal of its kind, as Kalaiarasan Thangavel’s directorial ‘Aan Paavam Pollathathu’ had a scene where a husband (Rio Raj) slut-shames, taunts, and humiliates his wife’s (Malavika Manoj) choice of clothing during a family function and asks her to change, as it’s hurting the image of their parents and goes against the set societal norms of ‘how to be a woman’. But the problem arises when Vignesh Karthik builds up the short, making us sense that he is set to flip the narrative with a strongly outspoken daughter questioning the rigid norms and even breaking them, only to end up ‘caressing’ the oppressor with a calculated ‘mass’ scene. The hooting and cheering that Sivaji got on stage in Hyderabad, Vignesh gets it here.

Equating a woman’s choice of clothing in which she is comfortable with a man’s inability to grasp her agency by wearing torn undergarments to a celebratory gathering, Vignesh falls into a false equivalency and blatant mansplaining. He fundamentally confuses the two: one is of freedom of choice; the other is a gimmick worn to weaponise the term, frame women’s clothing as ‘revealing’ and invite public shame and scrutiny. This is even more telling when the director himself, during a post-film discussion, asked a woman in an X space if she would ‘wear a bikini to a temple’ and categorized women who do not abide by their parents as “stubborn.” When women audiences criticised the film’s regressive portrayal, the filmmaker dismissed them as pseudo-feminists or “aravekaadana” (half-baked) feminists, a classic defensive slur used by men in power to delegitimise women’s lived experiences by framing their dissent as an ‘insincere’ performance.

When we see Baskar in the introduction, we see him swiping through photos of his daughter only in sarees and feel proud of her being reserved, conventional, and ‘homely,’ showing us his ingrained misogyny imbibed through generations of patriarchy. This isn’t just a character flaw; it mirrors a larger, systemic policing of women’s bodies. We saw this in real-time when actor Sivaji in the same stage, praised a woman host’s ‘dress sense’ based on her wearing a saree.

Witness how Vignesh frames Basker meeting his daughter, Sharnitha, styled in a nautical-striped notched tank and frayed-hem charcoal denim cut-offs. The camera executes a slow tilt-up from her legs to her hips, then to her face, while intercutting reaction shots of men (even Bhaskar’s driver) ogling her. Accompanied by a suspenseful, tense-inducing piano tune, Baskar stands in a state of pious disgust and disconcertment, reinstating the same problematic male gaze modern Tamil Cinema fought to move far away from.

The hypocrisy in the film extends to its first story as well. Titled ‘Dear Fan…’ on the extent of fan rivalry and its extremism, while the short critiques and bashes up fan war culture and its hero worship, just like actor and racer Ajith has been doing for years. The critique becomes shallow when the film in itself keeps using mass dialogues, meme references, and popular actor references even after the short ends. It keeps throwing references at you, making you introspect whether the intention was to callout the extremes of fan culture or to ragebait fans by touching on this topic to appear in memes, thereby adding fuel to the fanboyism. Even with its lack of naunce, the short in its entirety fails to explore the psychological or sociological perspective of either the godlike persona of stars or the devotion of fans.

The same hypocrisy can be seen in how there is a stark difference in narrators’ introductions: while Mohammad Sherif (Vignesh himself) gets an aggrandizing ‘mass’ entry. Priya Bhavani Shankar (as Shilpa) is with soft, sensual music, with a “semmaya irrukale (she looks so good)” comment from the producer with a lustful gaze, sprinkled with sexual innuendos throughout.

As both ‘Aan Paavam Pollathathu‘ and this sequel mock women’s agency with slandering of ‘my choice’ phrase, the third segment of ‘Hot Spot 2 Much‘ is much like how Baskar uses ultra-conservative rhetoric by comparing a girlfriend, bestie dynamic to “cholera to the culture,” stating contemporary relationships are “toxic” and a “protector” is needed to quarantine these modern influences to save culture’s “purity”.  Titled ‘Yours Lovingly, Love,’ the short is a half-baked, skewed commentary on modern relationships and the avowed lack of “true love”. From taunting live-in mimicking singappenney (a song on women empowerment from Vijay’s film ‘Bigil’) to reducing women to mere use-and-throw plastic cups, the short adopts a snarky tone. Here, the excuse is time travel.

While meta-ness can help pull audiences easily in, both Hot Spots use it as a mere excuse to escape their chance of immersive storytelling, with constant intercutting to the narrator making storytelling feel jejune. The main so-called ‘twists’ that Vignesh Karthik always has in his films, from ‘Thittam Irandu‘, which shows a trans person’s coming out and the transitioning journey for ‘shock value’ with offensive, triggering terms like ‘biological error’ and ‘natural problem’ while referring to the trans identity, to this series, both end up being regressive. Here, the coming out is accompanied by a kulavai (ululation) sound effect, traditionally a divine celebratory sound meant to ward off evil or signal divine possession. Paired with a wide-eyed, horrified cis-het man, Vignesh repurposes kulavai as a wail, framing it as a ‘grief’ of family honor and spiritual possession, designed to trigger a latent fear about queerness in the audience.

Even the film’s critique of KS Ravikumar’s ‘Padayappa‘ for its outdated views on “virtuous” women is a hollow jab, as it commits the same moral policing under a modern lens. With a woman narrator in front and telling a tale where a man is explicitly stating a triggering plea to a woman, “there’s no wrong thing to just adjust a little for us,” in a mainstream film, coming across as an attempt to soften the blow to patriarchy by weaponizing guilt and it is a disturbing display of female subjugation passed off as upholding family honour.

Oxford University Press termed its 2025 word of the year as ragebait and defined it as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement.” ‘Hot Spot 2 Much’ is a perfect ragebait.

Vijaya Shankar O is a Chennai-based journalist with nearly three years of experience covering cinema, gender, and social issues. His work has appeared in DT Next and High On Films.