Recent Reviews by Vishal Menon
The Hollywood Reporter India
Vishal Menon is the Assoiciate Editor at The Hollywood Reporter, India. He was previously with Film Companion and The Hindu. He writes about Malayalam and Tamil Cinema.
Films reviewed on this Page
Amaran
An Earnest Sivakarthikeyan, Stellar Battle Sequences, Middling Drama
The film is sustained by the power of its source material and its inspirational hero, rather than its filmmaking.
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,
Read all 6 reviews of Amaran here
Bougainvillea
A Gripping Mind Game With Stellar Acts
The film potently uses the unreliable narrator trope to fully immerse the audience into a story about “gaslighting” and domestic abuse.
Amal Neerad and his co-writer Lajo Jose (whose story this film is based on) know how far to push the unreliable narrator trope. Not only is their protagonist Reethu (Jyothirmayi in her return) suffering from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, but we’re seeing the film through her perspective for the most part. What makes this film even more complex is how quickly we get the feeling that we cannot rely on the people Reethu relies on to make sense of her chilling universe.
Read all 5 reviews of Bougainvillea here
Vettaiyan
Unsubtle, Clunky But Engaging
A cop drama using cinematic tropes to make you rethink who you should be whistling for.
Journalist-turned-director T. J. Gnanavel doesn’t seem to care much for any sort of filmmaking subtleties. It’s as though he enjoys dialling up the volume knob to underline his already-dramatic writing, and doesn’t let you rest until you feel the full weight of a scene’s emotions. This was obvious in the way he didn’t stop by just showing you a police officer dragging a beaten-up Manikandan K. into the back of a police jeep in Jai Bhim (2021).