‘Her’ Movie Review: Urvashi Delights In A Potent Mix Of Genres And Issues

Director: Lijin Jose
Cast: Parvathy Thiruvothu, Lijomol Jose, Remya Nambeesan, Urvashi, Prathap Pothan, Aishwarya Rajesh 
Writer: Archana Vasudev
Language: Malayalam 

Her is currently streaming on manoramaMAX.

It’s not fair to call Lijin Jose’s Her, written by Archana Vasudev, an anthology. On the surface, these are the stories of five women taking place across five households in and around Thiruvananthapuram. The timelines are jumbled and these stories are set across different genres with at least one comedy, one satire and parts you can broadly call drama, each with its own mood and theme. Yet you feel conflicted by the thought of calling it an anthology because it never stops feeling like a unified whole, with the narrative smoothness of a well-written feature film (it’s edited by Kiran Das).

Take for instance, the diversity in the issues we see when we compare the first and third segments of Her. This first part is intense, with a story you’d expect to see in a film with this title. It discusses the unmarried status of a woman in her 30s, her nosy neighbours, unemployment, the male gaze and her complex relationship. All of this is conveyed in real-time, making you feel the sort of suffocation Anamika (Aishwarya Rajesh) grapples with like it’s a part of her daily routine.

She appears to have achieved zen-levels of detachment, having heard and seen all of this hundreds of times before. The segment uses red ants as a metaphor for these taunts manifesting physically as a creepy-crawly feeling all over Anamika’s body.

Yet the film doesn’t conveniently provide solutions to all her problems. You keep her story at the back of your mind until much later when you see her finding a little bit of solace, a moment of peace, away from all the noise.

But for all of the self-seriousness, you’d hardly imagine a story like that of Santha (Urvashi) and Vijayakumar (the late Prathap Pothan) to follow Anamika’s. You see traces of Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) in this story, but it’s been reimagined so organically that you’re happy to overlook the similarities. It’s a film that was written over two years ago, before all the chatter around artificial intelligence, and yet you get a slice-of-life comedy that is all about a loving husband, his wife and his Amazon Alexa. Urvashi is delightful as the jealous Santha, adding a layer through her performance that reminds you of how even this could be interpreted as a love triangle. It is her expressions that bring to life an inanimate object, resulting in a sweet little film that stands out among the rest.

You find a similar prophetic spirit in the story featuring Remya Nambeesan as an influencer Reshma. This film takes you back to a time when there was a lot of gullibility with which we perceived the term ‘influencer’ in the early days of vlogging and TikTok. From their rehearsed “happy families” to their perfectly-designed homes, Reshma gets you to see the hypocrisies involved in selling you a personality that is the opposite of how she is in real life. Along with Santha, Reshma too has her share of flaws, and both become recognisable women we’ve met before.

But this is exactly what we come to miss when we reach Her’s last two stories. Instead of capturing a feeling or a group of fascinating characters, these plots feel like they were written backwards after having arrived at a major twist ending. The messaging is absolutely relevant and important, but with the limited runtime, there’s not much the film gets to do, except keep us waiting until it delivers on that big surprise ending.

Which is strange because we never quite understand enough about Abhinaya (Lijomol Jose) or Ruchi (Parvathy Thiruvothu). There’s little we know about Abhinaya except for the fact that she’s strong-willed and confident. In its attempt to fast forward through portions in which she falls in love with her fiancé, there’s a distance we feel towards her that’s difficult to recover from, given the importance of the topic being discussed.

This is partly true of Ruchi’s story as well, which unfolds as a tense thriller. There’s a lot happening and there’s also an element of suspense given the seriousness of a meeting she has to attend while also jugging a million responsibilities that come with managing her home. In theory, you’re entirely with Ruchi through what seems like a day in which everything seems to go wrong. But when these tensions keep mounting, you arrive at a resolution that wasn’t too hard to see coming.

But it’s the aforementioned narrative smoothness that ties it all together,  giving you the feeling of having watched a singular vision. Seeds that were planted in the earlier portions sprout satisfying payoffs that bring back the soft, enjoyable manner in which we appreciated the earlier stories. 

By leaving you with a few lasting characters and memorable moments, Her is a potent mix of complex stories told with the lightness of listening to a friend speaking straight from the heart.