Prathyush Parasuraman

Love can’t possibly be that bad. Though every time someone proposes in Chennai Love Story—twice, really, but it feels like two times too much—the characters weep as though handed a diagnosis of terminal illness. Their bodies heave, struck by anxiety. They turn away from the lover proclaiming love. They can’t stop crying. Love, really, must be that bad.

Noted film critic Pauline Kael, writing in the early 1970s, argued, “Movies are good at action; they’re not good at reflective thought or conceptual thinking”. A contestable claim, though it might be something director Nissam Basheer resonates with deeply. His films scramble timelines, introduce characters with breathless intention, and jerk into action with a density of information. There is hardly time to step back and take stock of the debris of information—the aftermath. In Rorschach (2022), with a mourning widower (Mammootty) trying to avenge his wife’s murder, it served Basheer well. The relentless unspooling of the film began to feel like a puzzle falling into place—intentions clarified, backstories unclouded, villainy and heroism solidified. In I, Nobody, however, it hollows the film out till it becomes a shell of itself—all rage, no respite. Fatally, the film is spun around a character, without bothering to ask or answer—who is this Rajeevan (Prithviraj Sukumaran)?

Gatta Kushti 2 is, first and foremost, a vast improvement over the first film. There, Veera (Vishnu Vishal), a laundry list misogynist, who desires a wife with long hair and short CV, finds, instead, Keerthy (Aishwarya Lekshmi). She is a champion wrestler who not only has short hair and is more educated than him, but also has the gall to lie about both. They get hitched, and eventually, after the wig falls and the illusions fade, find each other in love. That film’s biggest issue was that in trying to do acrobatics around the story—furnishing plot twists and forced changes of heart at every corner—it forgot to convince us why they eventually fell in love. For example, Keerthy, dogmatically against marriage, melts immediately when Veera refuses a dowry. Is that all it takes? Men, take notes.

It is no coincidence that The Pyramid Scheme, about, well, a pyramid scheme, is set in Haridwar, one of the holiest cities. The show doesn’t quite make the provocative claim of faith being a scam, but it comes as close as one can. It frames scenes of adult mostly-men in crowded halls, enamoured by the possibility of making more money, with that same wide-eyed, ecstatic fervour of a religious gathering, chanting mantras of successes as though hymns.

How many times are filmmakers going to revisit the same crime scene? To what end? Some stories fatigue themselves. After the gruesome terrorist attacks of 26/11, a cottage industry mushroomed. There were films like Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks of 26/11 (2013) so close to the action it felt immoral; Hotel Mumbai (2018), which looked at the massacre from the perspective of those working at the Taj; and Major (2022), a biopic on one of the martyred Majors. Shows, too, cropped up, Nikkhil Advani’s Mumbai Diaries 26/11 (2021), which looked at the massacre from the perspective of those working in the hospital; State of Siege: 26/11 (2020), about the military operation. Dread became cinematic inspiration. Trauma porn, a vision of delight. You need to be an exceptional storyteller to make this story feel worth telling.

In 1957, in Kerala, the world’s first democratically elected communist government took shape. They instituted land reforms that set the landscape bleeding red. The Church was peeved. They saw the Communists as the very embodiment of Antichrist, encroaching on their land. Dijo Jose Antony’s Pallichattambi is set in these ensuing years, where the Christians in the fictional village of Kaaniyaar, on the border between Kerala and Karnataka, strap up, hiring a goon to protect them.

Neelira takes place over one night. There is a note at the end of the film, text on screen, that transcribes the long, arduous journey, from Sri Lanka to Europe, that now lies ahead for one of the characters—Vasuki. That text, pregnant with odyssey, suddenly made the film come alive for a brief second. Then, the film ends. Set in 1988, in Northern Srilanka, Neelira, the first Tamil feature directed by a Sri Lankan Tamilian, begins with the preparation for Vasuki’s wedding—including the logistics of getting permission from the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the Sri Lankan army, though we don’t see a scene with the latter. Have they ceded control to the IPFK in this narrative?

If the film’s story is a skull, Members of the Problematic Family, set in Red Hills, a suburb in North-West Chennai, smashes that skull, and trying to glue it back together, revels in its failure to do so. It is simply one of the most distinctive if disjunctive films to come out of India, filled with a fractured irreverence and putrefying rot, where scenes have the inertia of a hiccup and the texture of filth—liquor breath, burning vomit, spit, blood, and that eternal sheen of sweat. There is a funeral. There is the spectacle around it—which last year, Rohan Kanawade in Sabar Bonda imbued with gentle irony, which debutante R Gowtham here, instead, dials up by sticking microscopically close to the action, the dead body being passed around, held aloft, undressed and dressed, oiled, soiled with ash, garlanded, paraded, the nostrils being pressed close by a child, and eventually, caked in cow dung and hay, and even a smattering of alcohol, burnt to ash.