Vishal Menon

There is a 10-minute-long sequence in Identity, in which an important character explains a medical condition called prosopagnosia—a rare cognitive disorder where damage to a particular part of the brain affects the patient’s ability to identify faces. The scene itself is loaded with exposition, almost like a TED Talk, but it is effective in explaining the condition of the film’s most important character. As a detail, it sounds just about right to make the character appear mysterious, vague and, of course, human. But on a screenplay level, it forms a solid base to explore the unreliable narrator trope—where the only person whose observations matter, is the one who cannot be relied on at all.

Bala probably forgot that he is Bala. Why else would a director with an obsession for the same pet themes begin a film with a song like ‘Irai Nooru’? The song composed by GV Prakash, isn’t the issue. It’s another one of those mirthful songs about a brother and the unending love he feels for his sister. They have fun, they go to the beach, they go to temples, they go to church, and they are obviously very happy. The year is 2025 and by now, we have a 100-year history of movies telling us that something terrible is going to happen when a film begins with such a lazy, happy montage. And then we must remember that this movie is being made by Bala, a man who has built his brand around tragedies. The remaining runtime of Vanangaan, then, isn’t so much about what’s going to happen and why, as much as it is about how many people are going to die and if we will care when they do.

In the first part of Viduthalai, you’d remember the long trek Kumaresan (Soori) undertakes to reach the camp where he is posted as a police constable for the first time. Even for a story that takes more than five hours to unfold, you’d remember the slow pace with which he treks across terrains, water bodies and hills to finally get to the top. Until today, I felt the pacing was intentional because we needed to understand how remote and challenging it was going to be for Kumaresan to work there. Narratively too, it was important for us to register the hostile terrain everyone in this movie was fighting over, right from the locals to the police and the mining corporation that wants to set up shop there.

The blood begins to flow even before the first scene in Marco. For a film about a bastard son avenging the murder of his adopted brother, it’s appropriate for even the opening credits to show his family tree in the form of a (literal) bloodline, as blood flows from one generation to next. Haneef Adeni, after the unwatchable comedy Ramachandra Boss & Co, returns home to a world he is most familiar with, in Marco. All his obsessions return too, including the Biblical references, Christian symbolism, Malayali men dressed for black tie events in peak summer, and the cringiest of English dialogues that are too lethal even for TikTok.

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.