February 27, 2026
by Carla Hay
Directed by Gopi Atchara
Telugu with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in the Indian cities of Guntur and Hyderabad, the comedy/drama film “Hey Bhagawan” features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A man finds out that his widower father has been covering up the fact that the father has owned and operated a brothel for many years.
Culture Audience: “Hey Bhagawan” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and terrible comedies about prostitution, pimps and how society reacts to people who are involved in the sex worker business.
“Hey Bhagawan” (also titled “Hey Balwanth”) is an incredibly tone-deaf comedy/drama that tries to make a pimp look like a hero. It’s also a very cowardly film that is afraid to use the word “brothel,” even though that’s the type of business at the center of this odious and badly acted movie. The movie thinks it’s being cute when it plays coy about the prostitution that is being used as the basis for all the idiotic jokes in this grossly sexist story. It’s not cute. It’s trashy exploitation.
Written and directed by Gopi Atchara, “Hey Bhagawan” takes place and was filmed primarily on location in the Indian cities of Guntur and Hyderabad. In India, the movie’s title was changed to “Hey Balwanth” by India’s Central Board of Film Certification, in order to avoid religious controversy because “bhagawan” is a Sanskrit-derived term meaning “lord,” “god” or “blessed one.” Bhagawan is the last name of main family in the movie, but in India, these characters’ last name was also changed to Balwanth. Because this review is based on the movie’s release in the United States, the original title “Hey Bhagawan” is used in this review.
“Hey Bhagawan” has an uneven tone of being a wacky comedy for the first two-thirds of the story, and then the last third of the movie turns into semi-weepy melodramatic mush, where men with hero complexes think they can “save” the female sex workers from their lives of “sinful degradation.” Regardless of what people think about sex work/prostitution, there’s no doubt that the sex workers in this movie’s brothel are stuck in a dead-end job. That’s why it’s an insult to viewers’ intelligence when “Hey Bhagawan” tries to reframe this live-in brothel as a “hotel for happy hookers” while also putting forth the story that these sex workers need to be pitied and can have better lives if charitable men come along to rescue them. It’s also so repulsively misogynistic.
When people are so desperate for money that they do things that most people won’t do (such as being paid to have sex with people whom they wouldn’t have sex with if they weren’t be paid for it), they’re usually not happy about what they have to do for this money. And it’s why sex workers (who are almost always desperate for money) are vulnerable to being exploited. There is no way to get around the fact that pimps are part of this exploitation.
But “Hey Bhagawan” heinously glosses over these harsh realities by having the pimp in this story look like an overworked widower father who is just doing what he can so he can afford to send his son to elite schools. In the beginning of “Hey Bhagawan,” the pimp in question is Ram Bhagawan (played by Naresh), who is raising his son Krishna Bhagawan to believe that Ram is a successful and respected businessman. However, Ram is vague with his family about what type of business he does, and Ram won’t let his family visit him at his job.
Ram and Krishna live in Guntur with Ram’s widowed mother (played by Annapurna), who believes everything that Ram tells her. Ram has told his family that he has a “cottage industry” business. As a child, Krishna feels neglected by Ram, who spends more time at work than he does at home. Krishna grows up believing that his father Ram must have a job that’s very important. And so, Krishna spends his childhood thinking he should be a successful businessman, just like he thinks his father is.
When Krishna is about 12 or 13 years old, he begins to ask more questions about the job that Ram does. And what does Ram do? He sends Krishna away to live at a boarding school in Hyderabad. “Hey Bhagawan” tries to make it look like Ram is sending Krishna to get a good education, but it’s already shown in the beginning of the movie that Ram is a neglectful parent. That’s why Ram sending Krishna to a boarding school actually looks like a parent who doesn’t want to deal with raising a kid who’s starting to ask too many questions that Ram doesn’t want to answer.
At his boarding school, adolescent Ram brags about his father to everyone in his classrooms. His bragging reaches a point when one of Krishna’s teachers calls Ram. The teacher tells Ram about Krishna’s bragging.
And then, the teacher reveals the real reason why she called: She tells Ram that her teacher salary is “pathetic,” and she wants to know if Ram has any job openings at his business because she’s interested in working there. Ram says he can’t help her. Is this supposed to be funny? It’s not.
The movie then fast-fowards to 20 years later. Krishna (played by Suhas), who received his university education in Hyderabad, is a recent MBA graduate who has returned to Guntur to follow in his father’s footsteps as a “successful businessman.” To the dismay of Krishna, Ram vehemently tells Krishna that Krishna cannot work with Ram and cannot visit Ram at Ram’s job.
Krishna has a talkative and annoying sidekick friend named Banka (played by Sudharshan), who has some serious co-dependency issues because he rarely leaves Krishna’s side. Banka accompanies Krishna to a job interview to work at a non-profit company called Mithra Foundation, which is looking for a business consultant. Banka is such a “joined at the hip” pal, he insists on sitting down next to Krishna for this interview. In fact, during the first part of the interview, Banka answers questions that Krishna is supposed to answer.
The interviewer is the company founder Mithra (played by Shivani Nagaram), a wealthy young philanthropist who’s about the same age as Krishna. Krishna is instantly smitten by Mithra and gets bashful during the interview, which is why Banka overcompensates by being a motormouth. Eventually, Krishna speaks for himself in the interview. He’s apparently so desperate for the job, he tells Mithra that he is willing to work for free. Krishna gets the job.
“Hey Bhagawan” is so poorly structured, it takes entirely too long (about half of this 135-minute movie) before Krishna finds out the truth about what Ram does as a job. Ram’s live-in brothel is called the Bhagawan Lodge, which has a big sign out front with the business name. For someone who’s trying to keep his brothel business a secret from his family, it’s incredibly stupid that Ram has his family surname as part of the business. But expecting an illogical movie like “Hey Bhagawan” to have any logic is like expecting a brothel to not have any sex workers.
And so, there’s a long stretch of “Hey Bhagawan” where Krishna desperately tries to keep “good girl” Mithra from finding out the truth about what Krishna’s father does for a living. Krishna is horrified and embarrassed and wants to find a way to shut down the brothel. Krishna’s father Ram refuses and doesn’t show much remorse for lying to Krishna, who is devastated by this lie. In fact, Ram tries to make Krishna feel guilty for being “ungrateful” for the money that Ram spent to give Krishna the best education possible.
And what a “coincidence”: Around the same time that Krishna finds out about the brothel that he wants to shut down, Ram ends up in a hospital because he had a stress-related health crisis. Ram is under medical orders to take a month-long leave of absence from his job. And so, Ram tells Krishna to temporarily take over for Ram in overseeing the brothel. The manager of the brothel is Ranjith (played by Vennela Kishore), a weird taskmaster who handles the day-to-day operations of scheduling and arranging the worker/client meetups.
“Hey Bhagawan” doesn’t actually show any sex. It’s another way that movie wants to use the “edgy” topic of sex work for tacky comedy purposes, without showing any sex work. There’s a scene where someone accidentally opens the door of a bedroom where one of the brothel’s sex workers is with a client. All that’s shown is a woman in lingerie in a playful pillow fight with a fully clothed client, as if they’re at a slumber party.
Even if “Hey Bhagawan” wants to be tame by not showing any sex, the movie doesn’t care to depict the brothel’s sex workers as anything but money-hungry, horny and/or in need of charity help from men. The only sex worker who is featured enough to have a story arc is a “happy hooker” named Champa (played by Shivani Nagaram), who begs Krishna not to shut down the brothel because she says she likes her job and she doesn’t want to be homeless. It’s later revealed that Ranjith has a crush on Champa, who has previously rejected his marriage proposals.
“Hey Bhagawan” goes off on clumsily placed tangents with a subplot about a member of the legislative assembly (MLA) named Durga Rao (played by Ajay Ghosh), who is trying to help his disgraced and ailing elderly politician father get back into the good graces of their political party. Mithra has a connection to this political family that is exactly what you think it might be. Also very predictable: Durga’s father has a scandal that certain people try to cover up. The movie takes a turn into unfunny morbid territory with a subplot about a corpse in the brothel and people pretending that the dead person is still alive.
“Hey Bhagawan” is off-putting enough with the movie’s horrible acting performances, irksome sitcom music/sound effects and moronic dialogue. But the movie becomes increasingly repugnant when trying to have it both ways in contradictory and muddled messaging about sex workers and the people who hire sex workers. The movie tries to make Ram’s sex workers look like they’re happy and “empowered” sex workers because Ram is a “good” pimp, even though Ram is actively exploiting them for his own financial gain. But then, the movie turns around and depicts these women sex workers as pitiful people who need help from men who have the money and intelligence to help them stop being sex workers and become “respectable” members of society. It all adds up to a garbage movie that’s not worth anyone’s time or money.
Trishul Visionary Studios released “Hey Bhagawan” in select U.S. cinemas and in India on February 20, 2026.
