'Neelira' Movie Review: A Frustrating Chamber Piece Set In The Sri Lankan Civil War

Neelira takes place over one night. There is a note at the end of the film, text on screen, that transcribes the long, arduous journey, from Sri Lanka to Europe, that now lies ahead for one of the characters—Vasuki. That text, pregnant with odyssey, suddenly made the film come alive for a brief second. Then, the film ends.  

Set in 1988, in Northern Srilanka, Neelira, the first Tamil feature directed by a Sri Lankan Tamilian, begins with the preparation for Vasuki’s wedding—including the logistics of getting permission from the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the Sri Lankan army, though we don’t see a scene with the latter. Have they ceded control to the IPFK in this narrative?  

It is a lovely framework, evoking Hannah Arendt who wrote, “Even in the darkest of times, we have the right to expect some illumination.” The right, not the hope. What, then, are the small joys that exist in the cracks of the day? 

The night before the wedding, through sheer coincidence, eight IPKF soldiers find themselves at the house—a case of mistaken location. Since they have to spend the night there, to protect themselves from LTTE attacks—though, the LTTE isn’t named—they take shelter at this house, holding its members captive. The LTTE finds out about the IPKF’s presence, flares up, and the members of the house are caught in the crossfire. 

Neelira is “a work of fiction based on the memories of a war child,” the war child being the Sri Lankan Tamil director, Someetharan, who having grown up in Jaffna, found his way to Colombo, where he worked as a journalist for BBC and an RJ, then touching Chennai, to study and work under Balu Mahendra. He made documentaries on the Tamil Eelam plight, Burning Memories (2008), for example, about the 1981 burning of the Jaffna Central Library, where 97,000 books, many rare, were blazed into soot. Neelira is less polemical. 

The film, instead, tries to enter the mundane, even as history is being written around it. A scene where the IPKF forces stop a child and an older man doesn’t go the route of, say, Israeli soldiers stopping a Palestinian father and son in All That’s Left of You (2024). Here, the foreboding quickly collapses into the next scene. 

Instead, the film wants to revel in the details, hoping these cultural details can fill up a world that is emptied out of politics. The puttu being steamed; the discovery of chapatis that the IPKF soldiers bring with them; the sound of dogs which become ominous warnings of army presence; the love for Vijayakanth; the shirts that women wear over their clothes when they suspect army men at the door, as further protection against possible sexual atrocities. 

Why does the film hint at the excess of the Sri Lankan war, but never state it, forget showing it? For one, this makes the situation feel like a forced diorama of a larger, more troubling issue. There is a creeping sense in Neelira that history is elsewhere. Even when characters speak bromide of war and peace at each other, it feels like they are speaking of some distant land.  It is not that a film on the Sri Lankan war must depict all its excesses, but when you see a film forcibly side-stepping it, as Neelira does, given the constraints of censorship and self censorship, the film’s intentional blind spots turn its vision into a fish-eye. Unlike, say Kannathil Muthamittal, it doesn’t even have the emotional force to buoy itself over these constraints. 

Neelira also lacks the scalpel to bring alive the lives of people caught in the crosshairs. For one, it is edited with a strange rhythm that cuts against the demands we make of the chamber piece—a sense of claustrophobic space; a deep, pressure cooker of atmosphere that threatens to explode at the slightest provocation. Instead, the film lingers on faces as though landscapes, as the muscles quiver and eyes gaze into the distance. (Though, having Koodiyattam performer Kapila Venu is a casting coup, every gaze capable of casting a spell, even if it is devoid of meaning; a perfume of hazy feeling is enough.)

Is the film, then, trying to subvert the genre? 

Not really, for every subversion, instead, feels like an inability to master the form. There is a background score that is frustratingly insistent on crescendo, it feels like it is displacing the film’s attempts to build pulse. The one leading up to the intermission is particularly jarring, the film almost collapses from the high cinematic ground it aims to perch on. Besides, the effect of an action often feels delayed from its cause, the gap between the army man hearing a gunshot and him picking the gun, for example. That gap of a second is anathema. The film has lost its moment even before it could state it.

What to make of these close ups then? It must burn to the surface the sense of a haunted life being lived—all the things the character has seen, which isn’t shown, but is evoked. Instead, the characters hold shadows of themselves in that gaze—nothing is intuited and nothing lingers. And as the film keeps relying on these closeups, the slim 90-minute runtime begins to feel paradoxically hollow—that it did not have enough to say, and what it did have to say, it refused to, preferring an antiseptic, performative melancholy, instead. Neelira builds the world with deep care, but it just forgets to inhabit it. God might be in the details, but faith is in the storytelling.