Yuvaraj Dhayalan’s ‘Irugapatru’, on Netflix, is a relationship(s) drama with good ideas that needed much better execution

The film stars Vikram Prabhu, Shraddha Srinath, Vidharth, Sri, Abarnathi, Saniya Iyyappan. With better writing, the not-bad actors might have sold the story better.

Rangesh (Vidharth) is an IT employee who’s disgusted by the sight of his wife, Pavithra (Abarnathi). She has put on weight, and all that extra physical baggage is a subconscious reminder of the excess baggage he’s carrying in his head. It’s a good knot (to a jaundiced man, everything seems yellow), with solid potential to play with. Then we have Arjun (Sri) and Divya (Saniya Iyyappan). The love has gone out of their lives, and they (and we) don’t know why. It might have helped to know what Arjun and Divya were like earlier, because now, they just look like roommates who complain that it’s the other person’s turn to wash the dishes. These two couples end up with a counsellor named Mithra (Shraddha Srinath), who has her own issues in her marriage with Manohar (Vikram Prabhu).

Yuvaraj Dhayalan, the writer-director, is sincere: there’s no doubt about that. There are some good moments, good ideas in – even if the background music amplifies them way beyond what they’re worth. It’s a fantastic touch that Mithra is so consumed by psychology that she becomes her own “patient” at home, while with Manohar – she refuses to have a normal relationship because of all the Freud and Jung in her head. But while this is a nice construct, it’d have been nicer had she had an iota of common sense to see (at least occasionally) where she is going wrong. (And let’s not even begin with the fact that Mithra keeps breaking client-counsellor confidentiality.) Look at the writing in the first half of , and you’ll see everything that could have been better in .

Everything feels like a mini-lecture, or a plot point that’s going to lead to a mini-lecture. (“Divorce is a cry for help”… “You stare at the phone for three hours but don’t look into each other’s eyes for three minutes”… that sort of thing.) Things feel childish and one-dimensional, and though we know these are very real people and very real issues (like weight gain), it all feels artificially made-up for the big screen. The psychological talk looks like it came from a quick Wiki read, and each couple exists to give us insight into problem each. Reality may be too complex to contain in the movies, but doesn’t even try. Everything looks all-t0o-easy. Maybe they did not want to inflict horribly complex warts-and-all people on the audience – but then, the very purpose of such a movie is lost. You see the Hallmark-card solutions coming from a mile away.

When you see a , you know that the makers have either been through therapy or know about what it entails. Despite a bit of romanticisation, the counsellor-patient relationship feels lived-in. We feel that “conversations” are being had – because the only way to resolve things is to talk through them. But in the very talky , it feels like “messages” are being given. is the kind of film you don’t want to be too hard on, because the lord knows we can use more stories about the conflicts of real people, without – um – fake flashbacks. But like in a lot of Tamil cinema that tries to address “modern urban issues”, the treatment is way too simple and superficial. One way to look at this is to say, “Well, someone is at least to talk about the problems couples face.” But when complicated issues are reduced to easily manageable / easily solvable problems, you wonder if it’s worth the effort.

You can watch the trailer here:

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