Recommended
The problem with Nerungi Vaa Muthamidaathe is that all these characters, all these threads (hacking in a power plant!) don’t always cohere convincingly. There are times you wish there had been fewer people on screen, with meatier arcs. I wish Maya’s decision to go along with Chandru had been better established (and her cutesy moment at the end is a disgrace). But it’s the sprawl that gives us the lovely non sequiturs – the mother of an infant who earns money by cleaning Chandru’s truck, or the “friend” who vanishes the moment he hears of the police and an FIR, or the man in the auto rickshaw who speaks to his brother-in-law over the phone as his wife holds on to… a goat. What the narrative loses in momentum (it could have used some tension, especially in the closing portions), it gains in texture. These aren’t isolated lives. They’re part of a larger universe, where people come and go, taking their stories with them as we turn our attention to other stories.