Berlinale 2026 | 'Members of the Problematic Family' Movie Review: One of the Most Distinctive, Disjunctive Films to Come out of India

If the film’s story is a skull, Members of the Problematic Family, set in Red Hills, a suburb in North-West Chennai, smashes that skull, and trying to glue it back together, revels in its failure to do so. It is simply one of the most distinctive if disjunctive films to come out of India, filled with a fractured irreverence and putrefying rot, where scenes have the inertia of a hiccup and the texture of filth—liquor breath, burning vomit, spit, blood, and that eternal sheen of sweat. 

There is a funeral. There is the spectacle around it—which last year, Rohan Kanawade in Sabar Bonda imbued with gentle irony, which debutante R Gowtham here, instead, dials up by sticking microscopically close to the action, the dead body being passed around, held aloft, undressed and dressed, oiled, soiled with ash, garlanded, paraded, the nostrils being pressed close by a child, and eventually, caked in cow dung and hay, and even a smattering of alcohol, burnt to ash. 

Who is the man who died? How is everyone related to him? Related to each other? It is a film evacuated of interiority, but makes up for it with full-bodied presence, entirely told through bursts of action and dialogue, where characters pantomime life, and in the edge of the scene, the questions are feebly answered. I say feebly, because exposition is not remotely on the mind of Gowtham—if it happens, it happens incidentally, accidentally. Imagine the audacity of a filmmaker for whom context, what some might call essential context, is a by-product of their storytelling, as opposed to its foundation. 

In a conversation with Gowtham, he cited the 19th-century German writer Goethe’s Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings as a manifesto for this fragmented and energetic cinema: “If you understand something, I am doing something wrong.” 

In the second part of the film, we are introduced to Prabha, the man whose dead body is being fussed over. An eccentric but goofy, lanky man, he is a nuisance and footloose. He slips and falls and wounds his head. When asked about the swelling, he jokes, “The road kissed me.” He begs for money and spends his days aimlessly. His sobriety and drunkenness become indistinguishable. How do you know if he is drunk? A character jokes, “Drunk he calls you uncle. Sober he calls you dad.” 

Later, after his death, someone comments about him, “His only lust was for helping others.” He used to be great at Kho-Kho, “Alcohol turned him to trash.” These words stick to his persona without becoming his personality. We are not able to assemble him—or for that matter, anyone—from the fragments of information thrown at us. They become the opposite of gestalt, being lesser than the sum of their parts. It is a strange de-personalisation that runs through the film. 

Is this the upshot of a culture that looks at life and death without much difference? The preparation for the funeral meal is done with the same noise and cadence of a marriage meal. A goat is seen walking, tethered, and immediately, its neck cut, the blood pouring from its slashed veins, the head kept aside. Death doesn’t really have the existential weight of death, so why must life have that? 

You are watching with hawk eyes for clues. For a bit, I thought the woman who rides pillion with a man, drinks juice on the roadside, which he yanks away, before dropping her off home and cussing her out, is his lover. Turns out, it is his mother. 

This is not the Bazinian realism of deep-focus, long shots. It keeps fracturing perspective and place, moving between different strands of a story’s place and that story’s timeline, without any lead-up. It stumbled into cinematic hallucinations before plonking itself in the arms of kitchen-sink realism.

Members of the Problematic Family premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival in the Forum sidebar, which, “aim[s] to expand the understanding of what film is, to test the boundaries of convention and open up fresh perspectives to help grasp cinema and how it relates to the world in new ways.” It is a fitting selection. 

Every few years, Tamil independent cinema produces a rupture. If Arun Karthick’s Nasir (2020) was a reminder of what potent and poignant political cinema can look like, a cinema we are still unable to make, PS Vinothraj—in whose circle R Gowtham, too, runs—with Koozhangal (2021) and the far more visceral Kottukkaali (2024) gave wind to a slim, hypnotic aesthetic that almost gave the long-shot a new lease of affect. Members of a Problematic Family, while less emotionally forceful and narratively slapdash takes the recklessness of form to new heights, simmering a sense of rot in a place. As the film bows out, it leaves behind the acrid odour of life left by the wayside—the aftertaste of alcohol-induced vomit.