Vishal Menon

In Aashiq Abu’s Rifle Club, manliness is next to godliness. It’s set in a hyper-violent world with no room for peaceful resolutions or around-the-table diplomacy. An eye for an eye is the only diktat, and it’s the meanest, most frenetic Western you’re likely to see from one of our Southern-most states. It takes place in 1991 and this gives the film a pre-woke recklessness that’s rare in a film set in today’s time. Instead, the film’s allegiance to machismo is so on-the-nose that it doesn’t even try to hide the many phallic symbols that “rise” from subtext to text. In a chilling scene, when an outsider asks Itty (a killer Vani Vishwanath) if he can speak to the man of the house, she forces him to look down, pointing at her loaded pistol. This is not your average household in which women are valued based on their looks or their ability to cook. For members of the Rifle Club, what matters most is the ability to shoot, gender notwithstanding.

There’s a tiny, two-minute stretch towards the end of the cloyingly sentimental Miss You, when we finally get a semblance of an idea that’s actually worth one’s time. Until then, Miss You is about Vasu (Siddharth), a man who cannot remember two years of his life, including his unhappy marriage. But as the film resolves Vasu’s battle with amnesia (albeit conveniently), he gets a call from a movie producer who approves of a script he had narrated a year ago. He’s been through so much during this period that he no longer remembers what he pitched and begins to frantically look for the forgotten idea. Getting a project greenlit, as we all know, is so close to impossible that we quickly sympathise with Vasu. Imagine looking through all your notes to piece together a script you’ve forgotten. Imagine having to trace your steps to go through the emotional and creative journey that made you a writer in the first place. Like learning to play the violin again, or trying to remember the recipe to your signature dish, there’s so much one can do with the concept of a man with amnesia. But Miss You is entirely satisfied chasing the one aspect of it that every single film before this has already addressed…love.

Sukumar, the writer-director of the Pushpa franchise, is something of a genius when it comes to staging setups and their rewarding payoffs. At certain points in Pushpa 2, you sense how he’s working towards a series of payoffs, some that were set-up in the earlier portions of the first film, which is set 20 years before the events of the sequel. At other points, the payoffs are immediate, giving these scenes an elegant beginning, middle and an end that is so good, they can be developed into standalone short films capable of amassing millions of views.

The first 20 minutes of Sookshmadarshini may be used as a textbook to learn the art of writing a setup. Writers Athul Ramachandran and Libin TB are preparing their viewer for a film that falls into an unusual genre but instead of rushing towards the plot, they take their time to focus on establishing their protagonist: Priyadarshini (Nazriya), a 20-something mother who admits to feeling bored of domesticity. She lives in a regular middle-class neighbourhood, filled with regulars who know everything about each other.

It’s not fair to call Lijin Jose’s Her, written by Archana Vasudev, an anthology. On the surface, these are the stories of five women taking place across five households in and around Thiruvananthapuram. The timelines are jumbled and these stories are set across different genres with at least one comedy, one satire and parts you can broadly call drama, each with its own mood and theme. Yet you feel conflicted by the thought of calling it an anthology because it never stops feeling like a unified whole, with the narrative smoothness of a well-written feature film (it’s edited by Kiran Das).

There couldn’t have been a more fitting title for the film that Sorgavaasal has turned out to be. When translated, it could be read as “At Heaven’s Gate”. This isn’t merely ironic, given how almost the entire film is set within the walls of a high-security prison. But the idea of being at arms length from heaven, as close as you are far, gives Sorgavaasal the illusion of it taking place in some sort of a purgatory. For some inmates, this idea of heaven is the day they’re released back into the outside world. For others, the exit sign points only towards death. But then there’s the third kind, like the man they all lovingly call ‘Cooker’ (Balaji Sakthivel), whose belief falls somewhere in between. When Parthi (RJ Balaji, as never seen before) cooks a delicious meal for the inmates, he asks Cooker why this isn’t the norm. Cooker replies, “If you start enjoying the food you’re being served here, you will feel no need to leave.”

In one of the many interesting segues in Rajkumar Periasamy’s Amaran, an officer talks to Major Mukund Varadarajan (an earnest Sivakarthikeyan) about the Kashimir women these officers refer to as “half widows”, stuck in perennial conflict as they wait for their husbands to return, unsure if they’re still alive. This is explained in a rush, as though someone is reading aloud a Wikipedia entry, but one can still make a connection between these women and the film’s narrator,