'3BHK' Movie Review: An Unsettling Drama About The Great Middle-Class Dream

Among the many factors that make director Sri Ganesh’s 3BHK consistently engaging is the film’s inherent relentlessness. It’s a film that spans a 20 year timeline, with it beginning in 2006 and going all the way up to 2027. Yet its temperament is closer in spirit to a thriller in which the clock is always ticking. 3BHK is about the average middle-class family’s struggles to buy an apartment during a period in history in which Madras slowly transformed into Chennai. With each passing episode, the family’s biggest battle is with time itself as they wonder if their city has room left in its heart for them.

As they’re tossed around from one rented apartment to another, the film redefines the phrase “out of place”. Like time, we constantly see the four members of this family struggling to find a corner they can call their own. Yet ironically, it’s their dream of buying their own home that continues to push each of them into places where they do not belong. For the patriarch Vasudevan (Sarathkumar), it’s his office desk that’s slowly edging him out. As a computer lands up in his cubicle, he grapples with modernity and the task of staying with the times. 

It’s the same computer that ends up an enemy to Prabhu (Siddharth) as well. Just minutes before he joins college to pursue his dream of mechanical engineering, he’s brainwashed to enrol for a course in information technology instead. It’s not because he has the aptitude for it or the desire to become a highly paid software engineer, he’s forced to join IT simply because “that is the future”. 

This aspect of 3BHK makes it more than a personal story. As with any other modern Indian city, the IT boom doesn’t just reflect the mindset of its youngsters, but it also brings about a transformation so rapid that it seldom pauses for the people that once called it home. This is reflected in one of the most moving scenes of the film; just when Vasudevan feels he’s gathered together a sum that’s just about enough to buy a home, he’s informed that the price has almost doubled in just one year. 

A still from '3BHK'

The movie may perhaps have been less stressful if the family’s battles were limited to external factors alone. But the relentlessness extends to what’s happening within close doors as well. This could be Prabhu’s battles with studies even if Vasudevan gives him the best education. This is also Prabhu’s sister Aarti (Meetha Raghunath) constantly having to sacrifice her aspirations for the greater good of their family. Despite being the brighter student, it’s Aarti who must settle for a lesser school, only so Prabhu can do better. And when the family comes achingly close to a home, we find one challenge after another snatching away their dream right at their doorstep. 

3BHK makes a habit of unsettling you, just when you feel it’s getting better. Designed to not make you feel a moment of peace, even life’s little victories feel short-lived as we wait for Vasudevan and his family to face the next crisis that we’ve already mentally prepared for. Each episode follows the same pattern with every major life event taking place almost entirely in conflict with the dream of them buying a home. If its Prabhu’s education that ends up costing them their house in the beginning, it’s Vasudevan’s health that stalls progress later. But the exhaustion we feel each time they come close, is by design. For most middle-class families, we’re told, life itself is an obstacle course with no finishing line in sight. 

Which is also why a film about their struggles will never be unrelatable to the viewer. Balu Mahendra’s Veedu comes to mind in several places, as does Chezhiyan’s To Let. But with the way Sri Ganesh writes his characters, they never slip away from making us care deeply. Even though Vasudevan appears infallible and ideal when we first see him through his children, we later realise how he too is as human as any one of us. 

The performances of the family members add to our heartbreak just as much as the writing does. Despite Sarathkumar’s towering physique and body language, he’s able to express the helplessness of a meek man who forgot to live for himself. As we see Vasudevan open his eyes for the first time after surgery, he doesn’t have the patience to ask his son about their well-being. As he looks around his hospital bed to spot his son, his very first question is about how much money the life-saving surgery has ended up costing the family. 

The same can be said about Siddharth and Meetha, who perform their roles with such understated softness that we almost do not notice two bright-eyed, optimistic teenagers growing up to become defeated as adults. Through this journey, Amrit Ramnath’s music celebrates their life’s rare victories to give it the scale of a triumph, just as Sri Ganesh’s writing never allows for his film to enter melodramatic territory. In that effort, we’re left with a film with so full of emotions that we feel right at home with Vasudevan and family. Instead of counting the number of storeys, it reminds you to look up at the apartment next door and recount the stories people live through to make their homes.