Suriya gets casual about casual dating in Vishwanath and Sons, and it's refreshing

After playing a deity in Karuppu, Suriya returns as a charming 40-year-old businessman and pistol shooter in Vishwanath and Sons. While the film is a feel-good entertainer, few would have expected an actor like Suriya to embrace the idea of casual dating on screen. A scene that barely lasts five minutes could probably be the most radical thing Suriya has done on screen in years.For years, Suriya's filmography, for the most part, ran on a fairly rigid moral compass: he has always portrayed roles that are just "right." So much so that it makes one wonder if such a man exists in real life. In his career spanning three decades, Suriya has hardly played characters who are intimately involved. He has played saviours and ideal protagonists who embrace the 'one man, one woman' concept like a ritual.This is where Suriya's Sanjay Vishwanath from Vishwanath and Sons stands out. He plays a well-accomplished man with boundaries, who goes on foreign trips, swipes right on dating apps, and goes on dates. One might wonder what's so gung-ho about this whole sequence?Let's explain what happens before and after the sequence to give you some context. Sanjay's mother Nirmala (Radikaa Sarathkumar) narrates to Maddy (Mamitha Baiju), a 22-year-old surrogate mother to his baby, a story of finding a condom in his suitcase. Nirmala knows her 40-year-old son has an active sex life, but doesn't act like she knows. It's a familiar kind of silence in Indian families, where even in 2026, conversations about condoms, casual dating and premarital sex remain largely taboo. And when Maddy reveals to Sanjay that his mother knows about the condom in the suitcase, it opens a can of worms about his casual dating life. It's a hilarious sequence that brings a lot of laughter into the theatre.As the scene draws to a close, we see Sanjay, Nirmala and Maddy relaxing on the couch, casually discussing his dating escapades. Suriya's character doesn't deliver a customary monologue to justify his choices. It simply is what it is. Casual, consented, and what every grown-up would do. This feels more refreshing because Suriya's image over the last two decades has largely been built on righteousness. Whether he's playing a cop, a soldier, or a righteous businessman, his films tend to use his screen presence to model correct behaviour — the ideal son, the loyal husband, the man who waits.Even when his characters have romanced multiple people across a film's timeline, the narrative has usually been careful to frame it as a search that ends in the one, with everything before treated as a detour rather than a valid way of living.Vishwanath and Sons doesn't do that. Sanjay's past isn't a problem to be solved by the film's climax. It's simply part of his backstory, treated with the same shrug the film extends to Maddy's decision to be a surrogate mother, or to the child born outside the conventional marital arc that so much of commercial Indian cinema still insists on.The casual dating sequence brings that same understated, non-judgmental treatment to a subject Tamil and Telugu commercial cinema still tends to approach cautiously: pre-marital sex. There is no shaming, no invocation of purity, and no disappointed parent whose silence is made to carry the moral weight. The family doesn't turn it into a moral issue because the film doesn't either. Instead, it presents it matter-of-factly, as part of the protagonist's adult life.Vishwanath and Sons isn't interested in making a statement out of it either, which is, in itself, the point. The film doesn't build a debate around Sanjay's dating history or turn it into an 'issue' to be dealt with.For a star whose past characters have often doubled as moral instructors, that restraint reads as its own kind of progress, not preachy, not performative, just refreshingly unbothered.- EndsPublished On: Aug 18, 2026 12:53 IST