Director: Girish AD
Writers: Girish AD, Kiran Josey
Cast: Naslen, Mamitha, Althaf Salim, Shyam Mohan M, Akhila Bhargavan, Meenakshi Raveendran
Duration: 156 mins
Available in: Theatres
Premalu’s biggest LOL moment takes place when the romance tries to address the biggest problem we see with its predecessors. In a clever bit of self-referentiality, it acknowledges its protagonist’s stalker-ly tendencies and uses that information to deliver on a joke that uses wordplay to replace stalking with stock-market investing. It’s exactly as silly as it sounds, but when Naslen plants this line with an incredible amount of conviction, you remember how a film needn’t apply a holier-than-thou attitude, even when it tries to be politically correct.
This is one of the many little things that add up to make what we can now call the Girish AD signature. The director of much-loved Thaneer Mathan Dinangal and Super Sharanya, finds comedy in the mundane and love in all the places we’ve seen before. Come to think of it, there’s a certain cleverness hidden beneath its title too, given how it’s what Malayalis think the word for ‘love’ is in Telugu. What gives an otherwise generic love story this edge is the fact that it’s set in Hyderabad, a place that’s super under-utilised in Malayalam cinema. And then when the writers populate this world with a group of absolutely loveable characters, each scene feels like a revelation.
A test to understand how Premalu works is when one tries to explain the film’s plot. Apart from describing it as something utterly generic like how it’s a love story about a loser and a hyper-focused girl who meet in Hyderabad, there’s not much one can add in terms of a story. Yet the writing is so special that it’s nearly three-hour runtime feels only as long as an Instagram reel. This includes a throwaway line about how Reenu (a delightful Mamitha Baiju) wants to get married and have a child before she’s thirty because she’s been through a terrible breakup. The film spends exactly 10 seconds to give us this info but that’s enough for us to understand her priorities and her genuine need to feel like she’s being taken care of.
On the other end is a clueless man-child named Sachin (Naslen), who finds no motivation to grow up. Instead of forcing Reenu to be his catalyst to force his transformation, the film is comfortable leaving him as is including a line later on about how Reenu is happy to take care of him, even if he doesn’t become successful. Of course this bit sounds like the absolute male fantasy, but at least we get a glimpse of a relationship where the woman is clearly more dominant without trying to make a big deal out of it. Even heavily-loaded information, like how Sachin became who he is a result of his constantly quarrelling parents, is treated with sensitivity, but without it ever turning into anything remotely melodramatic.
And if Super Sharanya used the Ajith Menon character as a parody of the hyper-masculine Arjun Reddy-types, here we get the other end of the spectrum in a hilarious character named Aadhi. This toxic positive gentleman is the absolute opposite of a man like Sachin yet you find how such people remain toxic in their own way, even if everything about them seems great on “Bumble”. The exchanges between Aadhi and Sachin are some of the film’s funniest and even this seemingly silly duel results in making interesting points about the psyche of the pseudo feminist modern male.
With perfect casting all around and a special talent to handle deep matters with loads of comedy, Premalu reinstates Girish AD as one of the most exciting Malayali filmmakers around and an auteur of the absolute sweetest kind.