Vishal Menon

Five minutes into Pravin Narayanan’s controversial Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala and there’s no escaping the strong feeling of déjà vu the film wants you to experience. It begins with the shot of a bishop entering the office of a hot-shot lawyer named David Abel Donovan (Suresh Gopi) and you’re thinking of a character from Lelam. A scene later, we’re drawn into a protest sequence and the sight of an old man getting crushed by the mob and immediately, Kuthiravattom Pappu from The King comes to mind. The sequence and the phone call that sets off the mob is something we’ve seen in several films before, but The Commissioner comes close, and strangely, the film’s ending gets you to recall The Truth. All of these films belong in the ’90s and so does most of Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala. But it’s not just the dated making and clunky dialogues that give you the feeling of watching a 30-year-old movie. It’s almost by design that the film wants to take you back to a time when Suresh Gopi was a legit superstar (the movie begins with a title card stating the same). Just like how the makers of Gopi’s Kaaval tried to milk the ’90s nostalgia by even setting the film in that particular period, Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala too wants you to dig deep and go back to a phase when a bombastic dialogue delivered in affected English was enough to deliver the big goosebumps moment.

Can watching a film ever make you nauseous? Director Raghav Mirdath’s Bun Butter Jam seems to be a philosophical exploration of this one question. Why else would the director of a light rom-com want to zoom in so closely on the shot of a man clipping his nails? Or the reason why so many scenes are set in the toilet, including one that has the hero talk to a friend while holding a used toilet brush? Or the strange ways in which the film keeps trying to crack the same double-meaning joke by using unending shots of a tissue box and what the hero needs it for at night? or a film titled Bun Butter Jam, it’s impossible to explain just how unappetising all of this can be. It’s a seemingly simple plot about two old friends who decide to live next to each other with the hope of getting both their kids to fall for each other. Hence the caption, “An arranged love marriage” in the film’s title. Yet the performances, the jokes and the plot points are so stale and predictable that you can write down exactly what’s going to happen on a piece of tissue, i.e if the film’s hero decides to spare one.

After making films that were all about loving your family (Kadaikutty Singham, 2018) and loving your siblings (Namma Veetu Pillai, 2019), Pandiraj returns to home territory with a film that’s all about one family loving another family. It’s interestingly structured, with an inventive narrative tool that adds freshness to the same Visu-movie template. And when we meet Arasi (Nithya Menen) and Akasaveeran (Vijay Sethupathi) for the first time, they’re already married, and they also have a daughter. This gives it the feeling of reading a novel by starting somewhere in the middle, and as we run through the pages, flipping back and forth. We meet new people; we understand their interpersonal dynamics and the love-hate relationship that brought Arasi and Akasam to a point in their story where divorce is one signature away.

The opening shot of AR Raghavendra’s head-scratcher Maayakoothu frames two creators and one creation as they discuss the philosophies of their respective artforms. Our protagonist Vasan (AR Raghavendra) is the writer of pulply serialised novels, and we see him deep in conversation with a sculptor he refers to as his mentor. As they discuss the powers they wield as creators, we see the mentor slowly sculpting away at the bust of a man, explaining how a single stroke of his chisel is enough to both bring life and death to his creation.

Among the many factors that make director Sri Ganesh’s 3BHK consistently engaging is the film’s inherent relentlessness. It’s a film that spans a 20 year timeline, with it beginning in 2006 and going all the way up to 2027. Yet its temperament is closer in spirit to a thriller in which the clock is always ticking. 3BHK is about the average middle-class family’s struggles to buy an apartment during a period in history in which Madras slowly transformed into Chennai. With each passing episode, the family’s biggest battle is with time itself as they wonder if their city has room left in its heart for them. As they’re tossed around from one rented apartment to another, the film redefines the phrase “out of place”. Like time, we constantly see the four members of this family struggling to find a corner they can call their own. Yet ironically, it’s their dream of buying their own home that continues to push each of them into places where they do not belong. For the patriarch Vasudevan (Sarathkumar), it’s his office desk that’s slowly edging him out. As a computer lands up in his cubicle, he grapples with modernity and the task of staying with the times.

The core plot of Shanmuga Priyan’s Love Marriage surely deserved a better film. Like Sooraj Barjatya’s Vivah (2006), Love Marriage too is written around the various stages between engagement, marriage and the relationships that form or get broken along the way. The engagement is said to take place between Ram (Vikram Prabhu) and Ambika (Sushmitha Bhat), and we get the feeling that they’re being forced to get married, just hours after they first meet each other. From a distance, it appears to be a film that romanticises the concept of an arranged marriage. In one place, we’re told that both Ram and Ambika belong to different castes, but their getting together isn’t an issue for their elders because they both belong to similar class groups in the hierarchy. However, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be an entirely smooth ride for Ram and Ambika.

When Vipin Das, the producer of Vyasana Sametham Bandhu Mithradhikal (With Condolences, Friends and Relatives), last directed a film, he made Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil (2024), a hilarious confusion-comedy that culminated in a million things going wrong at a wedding. The hit comedy was something a master like Priyadarshan would have been proud to call his own. But if he were to watch Vyasana Sametham Bandhu Mithradhikal, he’d be prouder. Made by another Vipin (S Vipin), he borrows the chaos of a Priyadarshan-esque comedy and plants it within a dark comedic setting that is already primed for the wildest of laughs. So, instead of a wedding like in his guru’s film, Vipin sets up his comedy on the day on which the film’s protagonist Anjali’s (Anaswara Rajan) grandmother passes away. What makes the timing impeccably imperfect is that she’s just a week away from getting engaged to her toxic fiancé. On one hand, you feel deeply for Anjali for having lost the one person in the family she connected strongly to; in the other hand, her grandmother’s passing is a blessing in disguise, giving her hope that she can get out of a marriage she was never interested in.

During certain passages in Shahi Kabir’s Ronth , we do not feel like we’re watching the story of two separate police officers, played by Roshan Mathew and Dilesh Pothan. Instead, the sparks in Shahi Kabir’s writing give us the feeling that we’re watching one person on two opposite ends of a character arc with each character representing a before and an after scenario of what serving in the police force can do to you. On one end of this arc is Roshan’s Dinnath, a junior officer at the Dharamshala police station in Idukki, still naive and open-eyed about the kind of upright police officer he wants to be. On the other is his senior Yohannan (Dileesh Pothan), decades into his service and closer in form to the pot-bellied police officer we’re used to seeing in real life. ohannan appears to be far more practical and real, almost to a fault. At one point, we see him taking money from a priest after an accident. Yohannan figures by going close to the priest that the latter’s had a glass of wine, but instead of letting him go easy, Yohannan asks the priest to cough up a certain an amount of money. Yohannan is quick to clarify that this amount is not a bribe. He explains to Dinnath about the money he needs to pay the garage for fixing up their police jeep and how difficult it is to be able to get a refund from the police department. When Yohannan ends up giving us his side of the story, we needn’t fully agree with his point, but we understand where he’s coming from.