Readers Write In #843: Comfort watching, competitive rewatching

By Sai Prasath

On why some films never leave you, even long after the credits roll

I love Prem Kumar as a director, but more so as a person. I heard his interview before Meiyazhagan with Baddy on YouTube, and the clarity he had, the kind of person he came across as, his beliefs, it was rare. I was nodding along to a lot of the things he was saying and it ended with utmost admiration for the man. I walked into Meiyazhagan a couple of days later, already knowing that I was going to love this movie. I ended up loving it more than I thought it would. And that was his win. With 96, I didn’t know Prem as much during promotions. But somewhere, without even trying, the film had over the last two years quietly become my comfort film.

I’ve done countless rewatches. Each time it felt like I was going back to my school days. It was almost like borrowed nostalgia. I was piggybacking on Ram’s journey, but running a parallel scenario of my own in my head. That’s the thing with films like 96 or even Meiyazhagan: the worlds feel so lived-in. The characters seem like your friends. The dialogues feel like conversation. Just the background score makes you ache and wish your own life had one too, underscoring moments you’d want to hold on to forever.

Sometimes it’s in the smallest of scenes, like Janu handing out notebooks in the classroom, glancing at Ram that a smile sneaks up on me, uninvited.

And then there’s the patience of 96. Take the long WhatsApp conversation that leads to the reunion. It stretches on for minutes, giving twelve different characters distinct voices, and it never once loses you. It sounds exactly like your own high school group waking up twenty years later. By all logic, in an age of supposedly short attention spans, a scene like that shouldn’t work. But it does; and does so quietly, beautifully. Proof that no amount of star power or great BGM can replace just pure, good writing in cinema.

With Meiyazhagan, it was the details that pulled me in. Thanjavur is where I did my undergraduation, so the railway station, the bus journey with an old Ilaiyaraaja song playing faintly in the background while greenery slips by the window; it all felt familiar. There’s a scene where Aravind Swamy recalls watching his friends play cricket while he sits on the parapet wall, umpires with a glass of milk by his side. Those details took me back to the exact same things I had lived through. And I fell in love with the writing. That movie honestly felt like a therapeutic podcast, just two people, opening up about their lives, and somehow healing you in the process.

Sometimes I think the more personal a story is for the creator, the more relatable it becomes for others. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but sheer magic when it happens.

And maybe that’s why these films stay with me longer than the big, noisy ones. I’ve been the first-day-first-show guy for Rajni or Vijay, and I still love the high of a raucous crowd in a theatre. But somehow, that adrenaline loses out to the quiet joy of rewatching 96 on a lazy Sunday evening. I think humans, at the end of the day, crave simple joys, something rooted, something you’ve felt before or know you could feel.

That’s also why a film like Bangalore Days always lingers with me. I still wish I could open my door to Aju and Kuttettan shouting, Mazaa bottles in hand, springing a surprise. I want to stay with these characters and hang out with them long after the movie ends. Share stories. Laugh at their jokes. Belong in their world.

And maybe that’s what comfort films really are, homes you keep returning to. Places where you sit with characters you’ve come to know, repeating stories you know already and still laugh like it’s the first time.