Vishal Menon reviews Balan: The Boy, directed by Chidambaram, calling it a painful ode to lost innocence and a boyhood that never was—a heartrending drama about a son's search for his mother, even when the film wanders a little too far from its core. Vishal admires how unengineered the storytelling feels; rather than a constructed plot, it plays like someone recalling the most vivid memories that defined his childhood. He traces Indhu (Farzana), who gave birth to the titular Balan in prison, as she and her son move from city to city, terrain to terrain, even religion to religion, assuming fresh identities and back stories while she reminds herself to trust no one. Vishal lingers on the duo's outlaw spirit, the recurring sense of the past catching up with them, and the moments—a shopkeeper's request, a marriage proposal, a heart-shaped earring—that each become Indhu's cue to flee.
Vishal resists reading the film through a moralistic lens, arguing that morality is a distant dream for two people still fighting to survive; the lessons Indhu teaches her son to lie, to stay on his feet, to never trust eventually shape the birth of a young criminal, yet the film never lets us judge him, playing instead like a lesson in empathy of the most brutal kind. His main reservation is the third act, which he finds forced and unnatural, drifting from the narrative elegance and psychological intimacy of a complex drama into a more conventional thriller that prioritises plot over the characters who mattered to us. What keeps it grounded, for Vishal, is how deeply the mother and son lodge within us, aided by Shyju Khalid's visuals and Sushin's gentle score, both working overtime to land each scene at a primal level. He closes by handing the film to young Adiseshan and Farzana, praising the casting that paired two performers who conjure the big bad world through the same big, bulging eyes, in a film about children who were never given the choice to remain innocent—boyhood, he writes, has seldom felt this painful.
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