Vishal Menon

It’s not by accident that the one lasting memory from Por Thozhil (2023), remains the tense interrogation scene in which Sarathkumar’s character questions Sarath Babu as they wait for a train to pass at a railway crossing. After the film sets up its characters, director Vignesh Raja slows down time to a nerve-wracking degree to give us a sequence in which every pause is pregnant with layers and undercurrents, as an officer interrogates the man he suspects could be a serial killer…all of this to the menacing visuals of a red traffic light flashing right at you.

Oru Durooha Saahacharyathil (under mysterious circumstances) is an eccentric film even by the mad standards of Ratheesh Balakrishnan Poduval, arguably Malayalam cinema’s most idiosyncratic director. You may or may not love all his films, but Poduval, even when he’s not fully in form, has an unlimited subscription to his unique brain and the powers that result from looking at the world differently. His latest film has everything from a Maoist in love to the concept of a man who dreams up real-life events, even before they take place. It also has room for a bedridden fanboy of Kamal Haasan and a self-referential joke, which includes a review of Oru Durooha Saahacharyathil as you are watching Oru Durooha Saahacharyathil.

Of all the years of film-viewing, I never imagined I’d require visual descriptions (VD) to understand what an actor is trying to convey. RS Senthilkumar’s Leader, starring ‘Legend’ Saravanan, is best watched when the bottom half of your screen presents you with descriptions that tell you things as obvious as “he notices car”, “opens the door”, “closes the door”, “looks emotionally” and many more. One can argue that these were added for the benefit of those with hearing impairments to underscore imagery, but when the lead actor is Legend Saravanan, these descriptions become a crutch to help you understand the hidden meanings behind his expressions.

There aren’t many filmmakers out there with as honest an understanding of the growing-up years as Vipin Das does. We see him begin most of his scripts by introducing us to his lead characters as children, often taking us into an aspect of their childhood that might not feel like much. This could be something as innocent as us joining Jaya on her walk to school through cashew plantations in Jaya Jaya Jaya Hain (2022). Vaazha: The Biopic Of A Billion Boys too begins in school with the formation of what appears to be an unlikely friendship. Its leads may come from different places and backgrounds, but these boys have a way of finding their gang during the strangest of events.

One suspects that the experience of reading the script of Aadu 3: One Last Ride: Part 1 must have been a thousand times more rewarding than the experience of watching the film. This is not because one’s imagination isn’t limited by budgets or by performances, nor does it have much to do with this film getting lost in execution. Of all the films of this franchise, this is the only film that relies almost entirely on literal humour. Instead of trusting these characters to deliver the goods with the film’s organically silly situations, Midhun Manuel’s writing goes overboard with wordplay and puns. Now, these are fun at the beginning and you also understand the cleverness of some of the usages, but you can’t help but imagine how much funnier it may have been to read these lines on paper, rather than make a huge ensemble present them, each with their own eccentricities and styles. Instead of figuring a specific brand of humour for each character (like in the previous films), Midhun chooses to repeat the same style of dialogues for all, lending a homogeneous dullness to a film that could have gone anywhere.

There are a hundred metaphors to choose from in Oh Butterfly; even the “butterfly” in the film’s title is open to multiple interpretations. For one, you may think of Gowri (Nivedhithaa Sathish) as the titular butterfly as she struggles through the fag end of her metamorphosis. Her cocoon is a trap laid out by her mind because she believes she was responsible for her husband’s death. She lives in perennial guilt, fuelled by intrusive thoughts when we meet her for the first time. Right from a tennis ball to a kitchen knife, everyday household objects have the power to trigger something catastrophic in her. As the movie progresses, what we could be seeing in Gowri slowly emerges from this trap as she finally finds a way to fly away, primarily from her old self.

Upon completing Secret Stories: Roslin, it doesn’t require a genius to realise that this is a six-part series that was written backwards. The climax of the series is not only shocking; it’s the sort of twist that feels so inventive that everything about it, including characters, detours, and plot points, feels like it was in service of this ending. What’s not so shocking about this writing approach is that this is something you have come to expect from a piece of content that has the backing of a mind like Jeethu Joseph (he is the showrunner). For his fans, the twist at the end is arguably more important than anything that precedes it. At least, it has been this way ever since he wrote Drishyam (2013).