Idhayam Murali review: Silly, self-aware, and surprisingly fun

There are several hilarious chunks in Idhayam Murali, but the funniest one is unintentional.

In the second half, Sam (Preity Mukundan) tells Idhaya (Atharvaa), in the same breezy tone you'd use to describe wrapping up a work call, "Ippa thaan oru mission mudichom. So konjam naalaiku rest" (We just finished off one mission. We will rest for a while). By this point, it is well established that Sam is a NASA astronaut, which is exactly why the line lands as comedy rather than drama.

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It's a very specific kind of silliness, one Tamil cinema has flirted with before. The film doesn't hide that it's chasing a Gautham Menon-ish vibe, and this scene recalls a bit from Neethaane En Ponvasantham: a throwaway line establishing that Varun's (Jiiva) family has grown rich and posh, simply by mentioning that his retired parents are now off travelling the world. Both moments reach for a big, specific, hard-to-verify detail and use it as shorthand for status or drama, without doing any of the narrative work to earn it.

The reason to dwell on such a minuscule, inconsequential moment is this: if you can look past this brand of aspirational silliness, a cable TV operator turning into a millionaire channel owner, one coincidence after another, and a screenplay built on daydream logic; Idhayam Murali is genuinely a lot of fun.

A familiar archetype

Thanks to the many characters Atharvaa's father, Murali, played through his career, Idhayam Murali has become an archetype in Tamil pop culture: a man unable to express his love to the woman he adores.

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The film is, unsurprisingly, about one such guy, who has struggled with the problem since childhood. The story unravels as Idhaya and his friends narrate it to the older brother of Fahadh Faasil's character.

Idhaya falls in love with a new woman at every stage of his life but can never say it out loud. Along with his friends, we end up just as frustrated watching him fail to say three words, and the entire film inches toward that one scene.

Style over substance

Only recently, the same stereotypical character — a man who can't speak his mind — appeared in a far darker setting in Obsession, which showed the devastation such cowardice can cause. Idhayam Murali offers a romanticised version of the same man, but never pauses to examine him.

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Director Aakash Baskaran steers the film away from any serious analysis or internal journey. There's no internal conflict explaining why Idhaya can't express his love. No childhood trauma. No embarrassing moment. No deep-seated insecurity. He simply can't express his love, and that's as far as the character detailing goes.

We also never learn why he falls for the women he meets, beyond the fact that everyone he meets is pretty; the world of Idhayam Murali teems with pretty faces: Kayadu Lohar, Niharika and so on. He falls in love because love is magical. The only justification offered is that someone must be special if they keep showing up in your life again and again. By that logic, every character in the film should fall for Idhaya, because no one ever really leaves, they say tearful goodbyes only to reappear two scenes later.

Saved by self-awareness

What saves the film from shallowness is its self-awareness. Take Fahadh Faasil's character, for instance. His nonchalant, understated performance keeps a familiar trope, the narration device, from feeling redundant. He's the one who stops the film from taking itself too seriously, which could easily have sunk its campy premise.

That self-awareness is what makes the silliness enjoyable: the film doesn't contemplate its own conflict, but uses it to keep building drama and, more successfully, humour.

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Of the two, humour wins out. Parithabangal YouTubers Sudhakar and Dravid provide plenty of laughs without much effort. Sudhakar merely has to lament that his friends didn't bring back booze from the US, and it lands. Their mere presence in a frame brings a kind of affability.

That's why Idhayam Murali succeeds largely on the strength of its casting and the care taken in writing even minor characters.

Moments to cherish

One of the film's most refreshing moments is a conversation between Fahadh Faasil's character and a bride whose wedding is called off at the last minute. For what may be the first time in Tamil cinema, a filmmaker gives this kind of character — usually reduced to either a loser or a saint-a more graceful conclusion.

In a film this frivolous, driven entirely by laughs, vibe, and mood, such flourishes bring a smile.