Kadha Innuvare review: Love stories that make no attempt to hide their Hindutva agenda

** Review contains spoilers **

Even if you lock away your prejudices as you sit to watch a film, it is hard to push down your doubts when the film tries little to hide its agenda, and allows it to manifest in every passing detail. In Kadha Innuvare, the new film by Vishnu Mohan,  who made Meppadiyan, devotion is in the air and marks of religion, everywhere, but not as an innocent part-and-parcel of the script. It is loud and clear where the movie stands, when designs of the Hindutva ideology are sprinkled all over the script, not by just slyly glorifying one religion, but bluntly dissing others.

The script, also by Vishnu, uses four parallel stories of couples of differing ages – childhood to youth to adulthood and middle age. But they all seem like props to drive the point home – only one religion matters. 

When the movie begins and Biju Menon’s lead character opens his window to the famed structure of the Padmanabha Swamy temple, music begins with percussion (disturbingly, the music remains loud for a long time). You are momentarily distracted by the topic that seems to be on everyone’s mind - the marriage of Ramendran (Biju Menon), 49 years old and seemingly least interested. 

Methil Devika’s character appears like an immediate answer at the office of Ramendran, where he works as a peon and she joins as a superior officer. It is all hunky dory as a friendship appears to blossom between the two, with the expected frowning down upon by the office hierarchy. 

The other couple-stories run in parallel. With the editing of the film not gelling one storyline to another, it seems like a mix-up of an anthology, accidentally put together. 

Of these, the storyline about two children is organic, adorable, and the little boy especially is a natural. Religious manifestations occur in the form of a big Ganesha sculpture that his father, a man with speech disability, builds. In the second story, headed by Anu Mohan and Nikhila Vimal, there is no more secrecy of the writer’s disdain for ‘the converts’. Anu Mohan plays Joseph, a Communist, who for no fathomable reason tells Uma (Nikhila) that he is ‘only a convert’ like it is a lesser thing. Siddique, playing Nikhila’s father, scowls at the Sunday prayers from a church and complains to a man he meets for work until he learns the other’s name is not just Rajesh (a Hindu name) but Paul Rajesh (Christian), another ‘convert’.

(Spoiler alert): All doubts vanish and the film’s stand comes out, clear as daylight, when the father gives a cliched backstory laden with emotional blackmail and the daughter, until then, bold as brass, bows down. All of it, only to even accidentally avoid the possibility of an intercaste union. 

The third story appears like a token one for Muslim representation and yet manages to divert any chance of an interreligious union. Hakim and Anusree play the leads in this story, he is a man selling liquor and she, a regular customer who buys it from him from a distance. He falls in love with her eyes since the rest of her is covered. There is an appreciable piece of writing in his reaction to a particular revelation about her. But this and another part in Methil Devika’s segment would seem forced, to prove a pro-feminist outlook of the writer, as if to balance out the regressivity of the rest of the script. 

Sad part is, without the obvious outpouring of a political agenda, there is an endearing storyline that gets buried under the weight of religiosity. But that too, it seems, is not original, with the plot closely resembling the 2018 Telugu anthology film C/o Kancharapalem. It is not clear if the Malayalam film is intended as a remake. 

Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.