Happy Christmas Review: The Katrina Kaif-Vijay Sethupathi Drama Is Entertaining Even When It’s Confusing

Merry Christmas Review: Katrina Kaif portrays bewilderment and fragility with sporadic bursts of resolute resolve. The contrast that Vijay Sethupathi embodies greatly benefits her

Director Sriram Raghavan, Bollywood’s undisputed master of pitch-dark thrillers, takes a step back from Andhadhun’s racy narrative rhythm and walks a fine line between the unhurried and the urgent, the philosophical and the provocative, and the classy and the kicky in Merry Christmas, a quiet head-scratcher that never loses its audience’s attention.

If the black humour-laden 2018 thriller was inspired by the French short film L’accordeur (The Piano Tuner) and galloped in an entirely new direction, the dual-version Merry Christmas, starring Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi (as odd a screen couple as any in the history of Hindi and (probably) Tamil cinema), crafts a loose adaptation of the Gallic crime fiction writer Frederic Dard’s book, Le Monte-charge.

The title of the French narrative literally means ‘dumbwaiter’. In English, the novel was titled Bird in a Cage. A freight elevator and a trapped bird are both appropriate analogies for the story of Merry Christmas, which takes place in the Christian community in 1980s Bombay.

In a literal sense, things – and lives – rise and fall in Merry Christmas, but the picture is astonishingly balanced. Languor is rarely as captivating as this. The film’s controlled drive, as well as its occasional lack of pace, are important to its design. Every cut, camera angle, and amount of blocking heightens anticipation and foreboding without revealing what to expect around the bend.

The picture begins with a split screen, revealing two mixer-grinders. One converts chiles and lentils into maligai podi, while the other makes a powder from tablets. Both hide terrible secrets. When they are uncovered, they show two sides of obsessive love gone wrong. Isn’t life really a grind? What one makes of it relies, as it does for the film’s two protagonists, on the flavor it leaves behind.

Filled with artistic, visual, and musical touches that considerably increase the mystery surrounding a Christmas-eve ‘romance’ between an unhappy married mother of a young wide-eyed girl (Pari Maheshwari Sharma) and a mysterious loner who returns to his Mumbai house after an extended absence.

Merry Christmas is both Hitchcockian in its unnerving twists and turns and Rohmerian in its sustained and piercingly unsentimental moral exploration of the relationships of love, devotion, and betrayal.

Raghavan, Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti (also the film’s editor), and Anukriti Pandey wrote the screenplay, which is riddled with scattered clues that gain meaning as the action unfolds in and around a woman’s home above a family bakery that distributes butter biscuits to schools.

The audience has so much to savor and unpack in this film that it never feels pretentious or overly deliberate—even when there’s just talk happening on screen, or stray glances being exchanged between two strangers, or just awkward silences being resorted to in trying to penetrate the distance that exists between Maria (Katrina Kaif) and Albert (Vijay Sethupathi).

Happy Christmas to both the main characters and the keen observer who gets a close-up look at the action without having all the details explained in detail. Chief photographer Everything inside and around the frames that Madhu Neelakandan creates implies both festivity and mystery, giving the interiors of homes and the cityscapes a hint of magic.

In one of the most compelling on-screen roles of her career, Katrina Kaif portrays uncertainty and vulnerability with sporadic bursts of fierce resolve in an incredibly understated way. The contrast that Vijay Sethupathi represents—an actor who depends more on his eyes and facial expressions than on words alone to convey the raging storm within and around his heart and mind—helps her a great lot.

Merry Christmas is a delightfully inventive cinematic journey that uses an evocative and transporting color palette along with a soundscape reminiscent of Hindi cinema from the 1980s to create a sense of bewilderment as the ghost of loneliness and the consequences of lost love. Maria and Albert both have backstories that have led them to this point in the movie, and they then journey together for the duration of the two and a half hours of the film in search of some sort of redemption.

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Albert and Maria exchange inquiries with one another. The screenplay, on the other hand, poses questions to the viewer, such as whether violence is always preferable to sacrifice. Is it morally permissible to inflict wounds on oneself rather than to seek redress from someone who has hurt you? Can two people whose paths never intersect until one beautiful evening form a life-changing secret covenant as a result of a brief meeting?

As they enjoy a drink together at Maria’s house and then go for a stroll, the two main characters radiate a combination of calmness and mischievousness. They exchange brief information with one other in an effort to help each other relax and provide the spectator with some clarity. However, the latter effect is not universal; rather, it is designed to function as a hybrid of concealment and disclosure.

No matter how much time the supporting cast members spend on screen, Merry Christmas keeps its attention firmly on Kaif and Sethupathi without allowing them to become unimportant. It is quite amazing that a performer portraying a character with a mere, nearly inaudible murmured phrase isn’t only a footnote. He represents the pivotal moment in the movie that matters most.

Beginning with Tinnu Anand’s “neighbour uncle” who gifts the prodigal Albert home-made wine on the day of his return and making its way through the appearance of a ‘lifeless’ Luke Kenny and a rakish Sanjay Kapoor as a caterer understandably overly busy on Christmas-eve – he is a ‘caterer’ not an event manager for the latter term hadn’t yet come into the urban lexicon – and ending with Vinay Pathak, Pratima Kannan and Ashwini Kalsekar, Merry Christmas is strewn with characters who leave a mark.

Merry Christmas is a thrilling, captivating, thought-provoking, and subtly difficult thriller—everything you would hope for in a thriller. Even in its confusion, it enchants.

Cast:

Ashwini Kalsekar, Katrina Kaif, Vinay Pathak, Makkal Selvan, Sanjay Kapoor, Tinnu Anand, Radhika Apte, and Pratima Kannan

Director:

Raghavan Sriram