‘Tu Yaa Main’ Movie Review: Reels, Reptiles and a Fun Time at the Movies

The prominence of a crocodile in the promo material of Tu Yaa Main made me nervous. Don’t get me wrong. I love crocodiles. I’ve always had a soft spot for them; they like sunning and relaxing, and their snouts make it look like they’re always smiling. Before you think I’m weird (I am), there’s another reason for my fondness. You see, crocodiles have often gotten the short end of the stick at the movies. Unlike their more renowned colleagues — the dinosaur, the godzilla, the shark, the kong — they’ve rarely been the star of creature features. They’re often relegated to violent cameos in stories that don’t consider them agile enough to carry a whole film. Even the athletic ones in Mohenjo Daro and Phir Aayi Haseen Dillruba got a raw deal. That’s just reptile racism. So the publicity campaign of this film felt too good to be true. Given the names associated — director Bejoy Nambiar and Aanand L. Rai’s Colour Yellow Productions — I fully expected the crocodile to be a twisted gimmick. A red herring. Maybe the croc is hallucinatory, or worse, a brand prop (Lacoste?) used by two reckless influencers to go viral.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when Tu Yaa Main opens with that classic horror trope: horny characters slaughtered in murky waters. Sex is a no-no in scary movies; ask the raunchy teens of Jaws, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream and the likes, who seem to die a gory death because they’re drunk and ‘loose’ (talk about creatures being a metaphor for sexual conservatism). The scene immediately establishes that there are no tricks: Mr. Crocodile (Mrs. C in this case) is very real and very literal, and she’s in the mood to avenge the unfair legacy of her ancestors in mainstream Bollywood. The playful references to the twin croc-potboilers from 1988 — Khoon Bhari Maang and Ganga Jamuna Saraswati — further cement this narrative in my head.

Perhaps the no-agenda presence of the crocodile is down to the fact that Tu Yaa Main is adapted from a Thai thriller called The Pool (2018), whose title is self-explanatory: a couple gets stuck in a drained swimming pool with an unwanted guest. Granted, she’s the pulpy antihero who eats anything that moves here, but any self-respecting survival thriller employs the predator as an unwitting therapist. By that I don’t mean the crocodile seated in serious spectacles with a pen and notepad on a leather couch (that was once her relative). The crisis of being hunted by a primal monster tends to fix warring couples, friends or strained parent-child equations. The danger is essentially a stress test for people on the brink of estrangement. These are relationship dramas disguised as high-stake survival thrillers — where love is the protagonist that must survive.

In Tu Yaa Main, those two people are social media influencers from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum: Avani “Miss Vanity” Shah (Shanaya Kapoor) and Maruti “Aala Flowpara” Kadam (Adarsh Gourav). She’s the Juhu diva, he’s the rapper from Nalasopara; she’s the poor little rich girl with millions of followers, he’s the spirited chawl hero with a dream. The first half of the film is an hour-long meet-cute: snappy, smart, bubbling with modern-romance energy. It’s a familiar template; her snooty family members and friends oppose them, his Mumbaiya-slang buddies provide the chuckles. The way she watches him, you can tell she’s exoticising him; this is her rebellion after spending years building a career built on validation from strangers. He just wanted a “collab,” but seems to have gotten more than he bargained for. The subversion is neat: he’s not the one after the fantasy of money so much as she is after the promise of reality. You’d think her artifice would make it impossible for her to see past her own digital identity. But her vanity morphs into a medium of vulnerability.

The Thai original starts in the pool and stays there; the relationship cracks are established and explored within the space. There’s no pre-pool buildup. It’s just a photography shoot gone wrong: a logical tool. It’s arguably the harder and more genre-faithful thing to do. So it’s natural to wonder why Tu Yaa Main takes the scenic route to arrive at the survival-thriller point. The setting of the stage is just as long as the stage; they reach the pool in the least organic way possible. The story works too hard to accomplish basic tasks. This is a recurring motif of sorts. For instance, the unsolicited pearls of wisdom from an old driver become the catalyst of their conflict. The presence of a whistle in the pool can be established in so many ways, but the film chooses a randomly elaborate star-cameo of a mute diving instructor. The irony is that when tensions arise, the relationship is already so loaded that the crocodile isn’t needed anymore. By the time the reptilian queen arrives, her services are almost not required. The two humans being trapped in an empty pool in the Konkani monsoon is its own survival drama. Who needs those giant snappers when they’re snapping at each other so intensely?

To the credit of the film-maker, though, the second half is extremely effective on a scene-to-scene level. Every other action piece is anxiety-inducing, and if not that, it’s so ridiculous that you can’t help but admire the conviction. Nambiar has a blast putting to use all his restless stylism and hyperkinetic craft to keep the single-location parts ticking. The deaths are gory, the VFX and animatronics are fun even when clumsy, the narrative is visually excessive without being jarring, the transitions are showy, the terror is plausible, and some of the dialogue is funny (like Maruti cursing his destiny: “When did I go from Gully Boy to Sairat?”). More importantly, the film doesn’t shy away from normalising the sight of the crocodile at the risk of blunting its aura points. Most movies prefer implying fear, especially if the plot is heavy on special effects. But this one swings for the fences in terms of prying out a connection between the crocodile and the humans; it goes far enough to center a climax around a moment of eye-contact that could’ve gone so wrong. Yet it works, precisely because we are made to empathise with the displaced predator (not the clumsy eco-thriller nod to how all the development has pushed animals out of their habitat into villages). It’s not an easy balance to strike, the screenplay is far from perfect, but there is a sense of catharsis about watching a horror movie that trusts the ambiguity of horror. You can perhaps blame it for enjoying torturing the viewer too much — particularly towards the end, when every attempt to escape unfolds like one slow-mo crescendo after another. We get it, she slipped; we get it, he can’t swim. But these are minor quibbles in a half that succeeds more than it doesn’t.

This brings us back to how easy it is to accuse Tu Yaa Main of trying to be two movies for the price of one. I found myself wondering why the makers opt for such a specific profession too — what’s the point of them being influencers if there’s no everything-is-content twist? Does their vocation add anything to the plot other than the knowledge that this film knows how the internet works? The context of their jobs is almost irrelevant in the second half: they’re just two youngsters learning to communicate better in a do-or-die situation. But perhaps that’s the point. Their ‘talents’ go out of the window when push comes to shove in the real world; when the environment is uncontrolled and dangerous. The film resists the temptation of patronising them for what they represent, even though we are very much in Hindi cinema’s version of eat-the-rich phase (eat-the-influencer era: Ctrl, Logout, now Tu Yaa Main). I like that they have no choice except dropping the pretense and seeking authenticity in that pool. There’s no scope for validation or posturing; the film squeezes the humanity out of them without endorsing their online personas. Shanaya Kapoor is well-cast as an upscale and sheltered performer. Adarsh Gourav effortlessly slips into the ‘tapori’ zone without reducing the silver-tongued Maharashtrian hustler to a type; he’s so watchable that even the goofier scenes look self-aware. They may look mismatched, but the lack of compatibility is part of the narrative conceit. Note how one can justify anything if they enjoy a film.

Another purpose the influencer detail serves is Bejoy Nambiar’s grammar of film-making. For once, it doesn’t feel like indulgence for the sake of it. It’s like experiencing the world through the lens of the reel-making protagonists and their storytelling aesthetic. The film has an alibi to look a certain way. It offers a readymade chance to be experimental with the shots, the cutting, the montages, the funky use of music (given Nambiar’s penchant for musical pieces, he even finds an excuse to stage a song while the crocodile is asleep after a big meal), and the dizzying camera angles (croc-cam is alive and kicking). The craft acquires some subtext, and the result is more entertaining than try-hard. The childlike affection for film-making marries the motive of storytelling.

It’s also why the second half doesn’t feel like a separate movie, despite the tonal partition. The toll of the relationship we saw is allowed to infiltrate the action in the form of callbacks and arc resolutions. It helps to remember how they looked together — a star-crossed love story — before seeing them at the risk of losing it all. It helps supply the decision to make it more about the girl and, by extension, the lonely crocodile straying into human wilderness while looking for a home. That’s where the adrenaline rush gives way to the duality of the title. Tu Yaa Main (“You or Me”) sounds like a battle of odds — a hopeless choice — in a campy survival thriller. But it also sounds like a hopelessly romantic gesture: it doesn’t matter whether it’s “you or me,” as long as we’re in this together. The journey from one phrase to another is affecting, even if it contains a few crocodile tears.