Pooja Hegde looks back at Retro: storms, injury, fire

Pooja Hegde marked the one-year anniversary of Retro with a post that reads less like a publicity note and more like a war diary from the shoot. The Karthik Subbaraj film, in which she played Rukku opposite Suriya’s Paari Kannan, released on May 1, 2025; a year later, she put names to what the production actually felt like from the inside.

“Storms, a ligament tear, endless mud, our boat catching fire (Suhas, forever a hero), and an island full of snakes,” she wrote on Instagram. “By all accounts, it should’ve been chaos. But it wasn’t. It was filled with peace, good vibes, a whole lot of laughter and a feeling of making something purely for the love of it.” She closed by thanking Subbaraj, whom the unit called the captain, for trusting her with Rukku.

Retro was made for around Rs 60 crore and grossed close to Rs 250 crore, a return that put it firmly in hit territory even after critics pushed back on its overstuffed plot and pacing. Released the same day as Tourist Family, it pulled in audiences for the Suriya-Subbaraj pairing, then settled into a long second life on Netflix, where it has been streaming since.

Hegde’s post arrives at the point in a film’s afterlife when the people who made it can talk about the making more candidly than they could during the press tour. The interesting choice she made in writing it was not to dwell on the injury or the fire. The boat scene gets a parenthetical and a name-check for whoever handled it. The ligament tear is one item on a list. What carries the post is the line about creating with the right people, and the fact that she still chose to use the anniversary for it.