Kantara - A Legend: Chapter 1

This is what came before Kantara. In the age of the Kadamba dynasty, the reckoning grows between the court and the people living on the land between forest and coast. The king wants the land; the people say the forest is not his but the god's. A man called Berme is caught in the middle, and the story establishes where the ritual seen in the first film came from. What interests the film is the birth of a legend: what the first film observed as tradition is told here as the consequence of a crime. Daiva belief, a fight over land, and power turning the sacred to its own use all run along the same line. Rishab Shetty wrote, directed and stars. Rukmini Vasanth, Jayaram and Gulshan Devaiah are in the cast, and Hombale Films produced. It opened worldwide on 2 October 2025 in Kannada along with Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali and English. It runs 169 minutes. Made for close to one and a quarter billion rupees, it took over eight and a half billion worldwide, and its opening weekend was among the year's largest. Who it is for: anyone who likes Indian cinema fed by mythology and anyone who liked the first Kantara. Who it is not for: anyone who has not seen it. The story leans on knowledge of the earlier film, the running time is long, and the court intrigue in the middle dilutes the main line.