Thalavara Review | A Mixed-Bag Slice of Life Drama With an Earnest Arjun Ashokan

In the last few years, we have witnessed some Tamil movies that had this coming-of-age texture where the hero goes through a series of events to understand life. Be it the Kavin starrer Star, Pradeep Ranganathan’s Dragon, or the recently released 3BHK, they were all at their core about the unpredictabilities of life and how all those things shape the hero. Akhil Anilkumar’s new film Thalavara, starring Arjun Ashokan, is a Malayalam movie that aspires to crack that space. It is about a man who had confidence issues due to his medical condition, vitiligo. While there are a handful of scenes that manage to put a smile on your face, there are certain overdone portions and predictable patches in the film. Clocking in at roughly two hours, Thalavara is a passable slice-of-life movie that never ignores the audience.

Jothish, a man with vitiligo, is our hero. He belongs to a lower-middle-class family, and his mother is the sole breadwinner of the home. There was pressure on Jothish to get a job and build a house. But there was a part of him that loved acting. What we see in the movie is how he overcomes his insecurities through a series of events and encounters in his life.

The movie wants to be a tale of somebody who overcame many challenges in life. The screenplay is trying to be this layered one where the hero is facing some sort of rejection, discrimination, or judgment for things that are not in his control. His mother and sister are taking serious jibes at him. His friends are mocking him, saying they are doing it out of love. When he tries for an audition for a movie, his skin becomes a reason for rejection. Akhil is actually using the heroine as a motivating catalyst. But just like almost every other character, she also has limitations in standing up for him. Rather than making it a movie where one event toppled everything, we get to see the many rounds of obstacles and harsh life realities the hero had to go through.

The lack of clarity on what the conflict is and how the film sort of invests in building the friendship dynamic of the hero makes the movie a bit uneven. While it tries to do the world-building through many events, there is a lack of focus on the screenplay. In the first half of the movie, we see a scene featuring a JCB. Even though it started from the need to show us the absence of a good house for the hero, the way that scene gets elevated felt very clumsy. It is actually in the second half that the film becomes focused and tidy. Addressing all the layers of burden assigned to the character becomes a challenge for the screenplay in those portions. The romantic track in the movie landed smoothly, and there was this smart scene in the film where we think two drunk men will create some drama, but Akhil uses that as a setup for a deep talk between the lead pair. The music by Electronic Kili was fresh, and it enhanced the romance perfectly.

Arjun Ashokan is trying the Palakkad slang in the film. It didn’t feel that odd to me, except for a few instances where he had combination scenes with actors who were really good with that slang. In terms of performance, I felt the movie brought back that earnestness we saw in Arjun in movies like BTech. The audition scene in the hospital was something that would have become a cringe-fest if the performance had been bad. I would say Arjun saves that scene with his performance. Revathy Sharma as Sandhya was really good. Be it the romantic chemistry between the duo or those sensitive scenes featuring both of them, Revathy had that command over the scene. Devadarshini Chetan, as the mother character, was fine in terms of depicting the emotions, and I think the dubbing somewhere made that character a lot typical. Everyone else in the cast was fine, especially Athira Maryam, who played the part of the hero’s sister.

Collectively, the predictable structure of this movie may not move you that much. But the groundedness of the characters and some of the relatable hurdles would make us root for the central character in certain areas. Akhil Anilkumar’s Thalavara is a film that uses the texture of a fun entertainer to portray the harshness of subtle and obvious insults. While some of it manages to find a good connection, there are patches that come across as generic.