Review of PK / पीके, directed by Rajkumar Hirani

When I was a sophomore in college, I randomly decided to take a course on Bollywood and the Making of Modern India, which meant we were watching a bunch of movies and connecting it to the current situations happening in South Asia and India.

I will say, I knew very little going into this class in general, which led me to a very strange career path, as I’ve now studied Bangla formally and might be moving to India in the next year. This class was just one of the many strange stepping stones of getting to this point.

Anyways, we watched PK around the halfway point of the semester. I had never seen an Aamir Khan movie before this, so this was a crash course into his films.

My professor didn’t give us any context going into this movie, nor did I look up a summary—what a wild time it was to go into this film completely and utterly blind.

Let’s get into the review!

An alien, stuck on Earth, finds a buddy in a journalist to help him get back home.

At the beginning of the movie, an alien, who we later dub PK, arrives on Planet Earth. He lands in Rajasthan specifically, but then the remote to get his spaceship is stolen, leaving him stuck here and unable to contact anyone from his world.

At the same time, an Indian journalist named Jaggu falls in love with a Pakistani man, and her family and community helps tear apart that relationship because he’s a Muslim Pakistani.

When she receives a letter calling off their wedding, unsigned, she comes back to India and becomes a journalist.

It’s there she meets the alien, who’s giving out pamphlets he made about God not being there, and she helps him out when he’s in a bind after stealing from a temple.

He tells her his situation, and she decides to help him out in his journey. As it turns out, he’s tried every religion in order to get God to help him, and this leads to a wacky journey where he deduces God is definitely not contacted through these useless human rituals.

Jaggu decides to turn this into a campaign exposing people who use religion for fraud, and the thief is found of the remote, but he’s sold it to someone else.

The thief is then killed in a terrorist attack along with Bhairon, who found the guy. PK is confronted on air by the guy who currently has the remote, and PK gives a monologue on television about how godmen are frauds, and people need to listen to god for themselves.

As we learn in the beginning of the movie, the guy who has it also is the one who screwed up Jaggu’s wedding.

It’s this conversation that exposes that the Pakistani man Jaggu loved might’ve not have sent that letter, and she contacts the Pakistani embassy.

Turns out the poor dude was waiting for her to call, as he loves her. He got a letter too that he thought was from Jaggu, and the two end up reconnecting.

PK is given back the remote, and he decides to go back home. Before then, he packs two entire suitcases of Jaggu’s voice, as he fell in love with her during their time together. She says nothing about it, and publishes a book about it.

The movie ends with PK coming back a year later with more of his people.

Overall Thoughts

This is an interesting movie coming out of India, as it’s using an alien, who doesn’t know anything about the rituals and customs he’s observing, as a tool to critique the current state of society and how religious leaders are committing fraud for their own interest.

I also find it interesting because it depicts a relationship that’s a Hindu woman and Muslim man, which usually is kind of taboo in such mainstream movies like this. PK really is toeing the line, and I’m kind of here for it.

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