Tu Yaa Main

It’s not every day that Hindi film audiences get to see a creature spread fear and panic. Of late, Maddock’s horror comedies have shown the appeal of creating a worthy nemesis with the Stree films and Munjya. Bejoy Nambiar’s Tu Yaa Main reminds us why we love to fear the croc in a survival thriller. After all, when it comes to sleek killing machines, it doesn’t get better than the cold-blooded amphibious reptile. Tu Yaa Main starts out as a love story between two Gen Z creators. The girl’s (Shanaya Kapoor) famous, rich and privileged; the boy’s (Adarsh Gourav) from Nalasopara and lives in a crammed house with his family. She’s sophisticated; he’s the boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Opposites attract, suggests Nambiar, as he sets out to establish why despite their differences they are MFEO (made for each other).

Bejoy Nambiar’s Tu Yaa Main, a relationship drama in the garb of a creature film, redeems an animal and a profession. Both, unfortunately, were subjected to great disservice in Hindi films. Given that the animal has lasted longer, its ignominy is greater, and therefore, the absolution was both inevitable and overdue. Nambiar’s film proves to be largely effective in this regard as it takes crocodiles from the mouth of disrepute and posits them in a narrative where they are given space to lay eggs, chill a little, and nap.

Directed by Bejoy Nambiar and adapted by Himanshu Sharma from the 2018 Thai thriller The Pool, directed by Ping Lumpraploeng, Tu Yaa Main is a curious addition to Hindi cinema’s sporadic engagement with the creature feature. The original was a compact, high-concept survival drama built around the simple premise of a man trapped in a drained swimming pool with a crocodile, trying to find a way out. Nambiar retains the skeletal premise but sets aside that minimalism, expanding the thriller framework into a 145-minute romantic drama inserted with class commentary and influencer satire. The result is an ambitious film intermittently exhausting itself instead of tightening its grip.

Inspired by Ping Lumpraploeng’s Thai film The Pool (2018), Tu Yaa Main shifts between Mumbai and a 20-foot-deep swimming pool somewhere along the Goa–Mumbai highway. The story of a couple trapped in an empty pool with a crocodile for company offers a solid premise for a survival thriller.

This Valentine’s week, love floats in a pool infested with primal danger as Bejoy Nambiar blends genres to create a triangle between two contrasting social media influencers and a crocodile in Tu Yaa Main. Playing out like a nightmare with a message, when a privileged, polished Avani Shah and a gritty, ambitious rapper, Maruti Kadam, collide in Mumbai’s content scene, their calculated collaboration ignites a passionate romance that bridges class chasms and exposes raw vulnerabilities beneath curated personas. Beneath the swag, we discover that both are survivors who want to change their existing profile. She wants to escape her luxurious loneliness, and he is eager to climb the social ladder.

After a series of recent misfires, Bejoy Nambiar appears to have finally broken free of the “style over substance” tag with creature feature—Tu Yaa Main. Here, the filmmaker’s music video-like aesthetic sinks its teeth into enjoyable material. A remake of the 2018 Thai film The Pool, Tu Yaa Main is a film of two worlds. The first—a spunky, sizzling attraction story between two influencers from two different Mumbais. The second, a survival thriller where the couple is trapped in a swimming pool, forced to face off against a man-eating crocodile. Even if the two “halves” don’t always inform each other seamlessly, they collide well enough in a film that delivers on all its promises and makes for a refreshing, fun time at the movies.