'Youth' Movie Review: Perfect Casting In This Fun But Familiar Coming-Of-Age Comedy

It doesn’t seem accidental that Praveen (Ken Karunas) is a huge Silambarasan fan. Right behind his bed is a poster of the Tamil superstar and you catch his expressions mimicking his screen idol whenever the matter to be discussed is his love life. The film itself is set in 2014 and there’s no denying the influence a star like STR may have had on a Tamil boy growing up in the late 2000s. STR’s influence, though, isn’t simply limited to this character, extending to most aspects of Ken Karunas’ first film as director, Youth. Right from Praveen’s body language to his through processes, the film’s situations and how girls act around Praveen, there’s a definite quality that reminds one of the films that made STR a huge star in his early 20s.

But one can also argue that this film transitions very smoothly from an old-school STR film into the realm of a proper, post-2010s Dhanush movie too. His fractured relationship with his father Unnikrishnan (Suraj Venjaramoodu) recalls the mood and the temperament from his more recent films like Velaiyilla Pattathari, Thirichitrambalam and his brother Selvaraghavan’s 7G Rainbow Colony. The devotion-like obsession with the mother’s character too traces its roots from these films. But beyond these relationships, it’s the nature in which the film distracts you from the real problems of its lead, only for the underlying tension to explode during the third act. This shift, though, happens so neatly here that the coming-of-age angle of Praveen’s character has been established right through with little details that didn’t jump at you, even when you were seeing Youth as just another film about teenage, school-time love.

Come to think of it, the writing is never really the film’s strength. We’ve seen the same scenes before, and one can easily predict the arc of this likeable loser and how he transforms himself. But the trick is in the way every single scene gets lifted by performances and the way they’re staged. It’s as though each scene has been written with the intensity and the pace of an Instagram Reel. At times, characters break the fourth wall to speak straight to us and in other instances, animated effects are added organically to prop up familiar scenes. Transitions between shots are Reel-era perfect; the film uses every single resource in its disposal to make you feel like you are IN the film with these characters.

Take, for example, a scene in which Praveen forces all of his besties to bully a girl who dumps him. Instead of a montage or separate shots showing these dozen boys annoying her, the film uses a swivelling single take to really make you feel the suffocation felt by this girl. It also helps that even the character with just one scene has been cast perfectly. So, if a scene is funny, it isn’t just because any one character is funny. It’s because they are all funny as a group, the sort where everything goes. Plus, when Praveen himself is just happy to be butt of all jokes, it gives the film a joyous lack of self-seriousness, an angle that makes the film very easy to root for.

But when it does start to become serious, the film has already planted too many seeds for it early on that we remain fully invested. Credit also goes to how perfectly Devadarshini and Suraj Venjaramoodu have been cast as Praveen’s parents. Unlike their lives being shown entirely through Praveen’s POV, the film is careful enough to give them their own space and eccentricities. More than just being a father or a mother, the both of them come across as real, flawed people with their own shortcomings. They’re not just antagonising forces for Praveen to rebel against but they work just as well as fully developed characters living with their own main character energy.

This gives the film the space to do more with Unnikrishnan’s (Suraj) drinking problem. At first, it’s played out like a silly joke about heartbreak, but the film takes the most potent moment in the film to bring back this trait of Unni’s drinking (and his propensity to speak in English). Not only does this bit tie in neatly with the film’s underlying message about the importance of education, but it also uses a special moment to deconstruct a difficult person and the reasons he became so.

It’s these moments that sneak up on you, even when you’ve resigned to thinking of this film as particularly lightweight. With scenes and situations relatable to any middle-class person, Youth finds engaging new ways to tell you things you’re already tired of listening to. And with Ken Karunas and his ensemble of a crackling new cast, we get the sense of having run into the boys next door, pretty certain they’re going to be around for a long time to come.