Thaal Review | This Ginger-Cringe College Drama Has the Potential to Give You Trauma

In the hands of a good director and writer, the latest movie Thaal, starring Anson Paul and Aradhya Ann, might have at least been a problematic yet disturbing film about selfless love. Sadly, under the direction of Rajasaagar and written by Dr. G Kishor, this movie is a horrendously cheesy and melodramatic love story that will test your limits of endurance with its cringe-worthy writing. With terrible acting enhancing the film’s unnuanced writing, I will have to say that it has the quality to be an unintentional comedy if you are planning to watch it with friends or family.

So, the movie is a flashback story. Two college students find these two names, Vishwa and Mithran, written in many places in their college. This evokes a curiosity in them to know who they are. They eventually find out that these two belonged to a batch that studied in that college twenty years ago, and what we see in the movie is that love story between Vishwa and Mithran.

The writing that has no layers, forced comedy, and shallow romance is the biggest problem of this movie. They are trying to mount this love story as some sort of epitome of selflessness. But at no point, you will be able to find depth in the romance between the two characters. And the mood swings and reconciliation are happening so fast that you won’t even understand how are they even in love. SPOILER ALERT! So the selfless love angle in the movie is like this. Our leading lady has this enhanced OCD psychological condition, which causes problems in her love life, and she and her mother are refusing to acknowledge that. So in order to make her realize that she has a problem, our hero asks all his friends, family, and college officials to remove his name and photos from everywhere so that he can tell her that he is her imagination, and she needs to take treatment to come out of this hallucinated state. Phew! If you are scratching your head like that Jackie Chan, But Why? meme, let me tell you that it was even worse for us inside the theater.

The director Rajasaagar is also very confused about how to even present this movie. From the very first scene, every character behaves loudly, literally and figuratively. When the character, played by Mareena Michael, talks about Vishwa and Mithran and says she feels a deep connection with them, I was like, how, when, and where? The flashback bits of the movie that show the campus of the early 2000s seem like a hideous recreation of some of the terrible campus movies of those days. When the film enters the phase where the focus is on the heroine’s mental health, you, as a viewer, are more in a what the hell is happening sort of space rather than feeling any sort of sympathy for any of the characters on screen. I felt really bad for Bijibal as some of the nice tunes were wasted in a crass movie like this.

Anson Paul, who proved his annoyance capability with Rahel Makan Kora (hope there won’t be a case for this mention), yet again proved how limited he is as an actor. His dialogue rendering is really bad. In fact, in the anti-smoking warning message at the beginning, you can hear him struggling to pronounce Malayalam properly. His efforts to play the cool senior in college in that first ragging sequence were difficult to sit through, and the audacity of Rajasaagar to introduce him along with Chekuthan Lorry was really gutsy. Aradhya Ann, as Vishwa, the leading lady with OCD and Psychothemia was yet another annoying performance. Her rendition was so loud from the beginning that you really find yourself questioning the hero’s decision to romance such a caricature control freak. The dubbing done for the character was also out of sync. The talented Rahul Madhav is wasted in a character that forces him to perform poorly because of the bad writing.

If there is any uncle or aunty in your family or neighborhood whom you wished decided to stay away from you, I would highly recommend you recommend this movie to them. Barring the music, which you might not even remember due to terrible filmmaking, almost everything else about this crappy and outdated college drama is insufferable. The number of facepalms I did during the movie was so high that I even considered having a new signal named Blood Red.