Vishal Menon

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.

In an early sequence in Moonwalk, we see a group of seven friends assembling in front of a vintage Sony Trinitron television with a video tape of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The year is 1987, long before smart phones and YouTube, and this means that watching a glimpse of MJ has taken weeks of planning. Each one of them have their own theories on getting the video cassette player to work; finally when they manage to get it playing, all we see are waves of static, with unrecognisable bits of Thriller on screen. For a small budget Malayalam film releasing today, it’s not tough to imagine how impossibly out-of-reach it must have been to afford even a tiny 10-second clip of the iconic song. Yet even without showing us a single shot of MJ or his songs, the film manages to find its way to invoke his spirit. It’s a film set right at the peak of the break dance era and there couldn’t have been a more fitting way to begin the tribute. Yet the real beauty of Vinod AK’s film is how he’s able to hold on to this feeling until we arrive at a very satisfying payoff, much much later.

Ace is a film one could call “ironically nostalgic”. It’s neither intentionally aspiring to appeal to one’s nostalgia by trying to recreate a beloved time period, nor is it a film that’s set in the 80s or 90s. Ace is set very much in 2025, and it’s a film that wants to be the sort of cool movie from back when Orkut was considered fashionable. This isn’t just because it borrows elements from decade-defining films such as the Oceans series or gangster comedies like Snatch (2000) or Swordfish (2001). It also feels like a movie that’s stuck in that same period without realising that a film needs to do a lot more to be considered funny today. For one, the makers of Ace feel they’ve done enough just by creating a bunch of wacky characters to get us to look past scene after scene of impossibly convoluted sequences. It is partly a bank heist comedy that shuffles between a long-winded chase movie and a melodramatic love story between a hero who has nothing to lose, and a girl confined to her complex circumstances. Tying up the many disconnected strands of the film is Yogi Babu’s Arivu, a character so loud and underwritten that he simply shouts a joke or two in his attempt to save a dry scene.

There’s a list of clever ideas in Santhanam’s meta comedy Devil’s Double Next Level that should have resulted in a film that’s at least remotely funny. It’s a spoof movie that operates on the same founding principle of the Scary Movie franchise and you find the film breaking the fourth wall throughout its runtime to keep throwing references and cliches towards you, hoping at least a few would stick. Some of these, like the idea of casting Gautham Vasudev Menon to play a police officer named Raghavan, might not seem like a big deal. But then the film goes several steps further to make this character fall in love with the protagonist’s sister and then run after her on the beach while ‘Uyirin Uyire’ from Kaakha Kaakha (2003) plays in the background. It’s definitely immature and silly, but at least there’s a bit of thought that has gone into making the joke land.