Vishal Menon

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.

There’s an infectious amount of silliness in Padakkalam which makes this fantasy impossible to take seriously. Speaking broadly, it’s another one of those body-swap comedies in which the jokes emerge out of our amusement on seeing one actor perform like another. There have been dozens of comedies in a similar vein, including Big (1988), The Hot Chick (2002) and Freaky Friday (2003), with Malayalam cinema getting its version in Shine Tom Chacko’s Ithihasa (2014). But with Padakkalam, we take a few outrageous steps ahead to be left with a plot that goes beyond the basic setup-payoff pattern of most body-swap comedies. The writers of Padakkalam push their concept to the limits, not just by throwing in the idea of one character being able to control the body of another, but also by making this a three-way swap.

If there’s one feeling that binds all the central characters of Thamar KV’s Sarkeet, it’s helplessness. In their efforts to make the most of the Malayali dream of making it big in the Middle East, we find a group of people who are just one bad day away from falling and breaking apart. You sense this helplessness the most with Balu (Deepak Parambol) and his wife Steffi (Divya Prabha), who are trying to have one normal day with their son Jappu (Orhan). He has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and the early portions of the film are built over montages that ease you into realising just how impossible it is to live with Jappu. Sarkeet even opens with Jappu knocking over a birthday cake at a friend’s birthday party. You notice how the wife doesn’t get a second to socialise before it’s time to look after Jappu again. Even when Jappu knocks over the cake, you’re amused that there’s no explosive reaction from either parent; their expressions suggest that they’ve surrendered to their circumstances years ago, unable to muster the energy it takes to scold him yet again.

Has there ever been another Tamil filmmaker as obsessed with the idea of irony as Karthik Subbaraj? You find this obsession in his earlier works too, including the very concept of making a feminist film by giving us the stories of three flawed men. Or the way in which the government’s indifference towards workers who suffered mercury poisoning was addressed in a silent film. Most recently, he also gave us a schoolteacher named Gandhi who goes on to become the biggest bootlegger in Tamil Nadu. But in his latest Retro, irony isn’t just in the details that make up the subtext; it is very much a part of the text as well. This includes something one of the character calls “beautiful irony,” like how a laughter therapy clinic is set up in the same spot that once housed the gallows. Or the cheeky fun Subbaraj is having when Santosh Narayanan plays a tune that resembles a lullaby, as Suriya’s character Paari schools a bunch of bad guys while they call him Doctor Chaplin. You find the same irony coming to the fore when he decides to write a love story about a violent, relentless fighter like Paari, who falls for Pooja Hegde’s Rukmini, a doctor, a healer, who is against violence in any form.

In what might seem like a silly in-joke, Thudarum begins with Benz (Mohanlal) — a taxi driver who got his nickname because he loves cars — explaining to his passengers the difference between a star and a superstar. He takes the names of legends like Rajinikanth, MGR, Kamal Haasan, Mammootty and Mohanlal, and instead of talking about their hard work, sincerity or unlimited amounts of acting talent, he says it’s because all of them were great at doing action. It might seem like a detail that’s being used as a segue to tell us about how Benz was once a stuntman in Tamil cinema, but you really need to wait until the film’s second half to understand what the real pay-off for that dialogue is going to be. It’s a clever bit of meta writing, infinitely cleverer than the cloyingly lazy ways in which the film uses references from older Mohanlal movies. Some of these were expected given how Mohanlal was to be seen with Shobhana after decades. But the others — like the two Odiyan references or the Malaikottai Valiban dialogue — seem like the work of an overexcited Mohanlal fanboy trying to do what they do best in Tamil cinema.