With Love: Chaotic Conscience

Star Cast: Abishan Jeevinth, Anaswara Rajan, Kavya Anil, Harish Kumar, Sacchin Nachiappan, and M. Sasikumar
Music Composed by Sean Roldan 
Cinematography by Shreyaas Krishna
Edited by Suresh Kumar 
Directed by Madhan 

Out in a beautiful land of paradise, where people are always happy being people, one young kid asked a question to his daddy and the amazed person repeated the question: “How did I meet your mother?”

To a 2 year old: “God creates two bodies with one soul. I met my other half of the soul, and that’s your mother”.

To a 15 year old: “It was a college mistake that became our life. But we never regretted it. Find one that feels like it”.

To an Indian kid at any age: “We will find you someone”.

At times, as Indians, we do feel a necessity to determine every direction of kids lives. For people in power, every citizen is like a kid and hence they take us for a ride, with or without our consent. Not going off on that tangent too much, just think: why would most parents think that they should determine their kid’s future? The majority of us have gone through things like not being able to get what we want, not studying the course we preferred, not getting an opportunity to pursue a passion or even giving up on a serious and sincere love. Yes, there will be reasons and if not at that time, after a decade or two, we do understand what happened and how to process it all. But why does that feel okay to do so? Are we conditioned to be protective? To be detrimental? To think only we would know best? Or is it all about trust? My analysis with whatever little or good amount of life I have seen or I know, is that people tend to either trust easily or lack it completely.

If you know that you live in a society where your respect doesn’t come from caste, religion, money, assets or lineage, how might our lives have played out? If we know that no matter what, all you have to do is find someone who truly resonates with your heart and be the “Soulmate” ultimate version, how would your choice of life partner be? I’m not saying this is only an Indian problem, but every generation and every country has these problems, even if freedom is absolute. There will be questions about choices, abandonment, displeasure and maybe acceptance levels might be better than in present society, yet problems still exist. Why? All this happens due to only one emotion in parents case: LOVE. Every other social, communal or monetary issue has different reasons and situational solutions, but parents are not a situation, they are the reason for existence. So, trust and love play a crucial role in their decisions.

Spoiler Zone: Reading on may steal the innocence of your first viewing…

With Love tries to talk about the chaos where lack of trust in oneself intensifies depression and anxiety disorder further. Sathya, while the name says the truth, is not really happy to live in his truth. He wants to design a great future but doesn’t want the present to be beautiful. He lacks any hope for that beautiful design to come to life as well. All this is due to one break-up? No. He has issues with his father and he has issues believing in life being magical after his castle ended up being built on sand on a beach during high tides. It feels foolish and turns you into a person who seldom gets ready to trust again. Does he believe that life ended on that Annual Day? If your close friend, the person with whom you can share anything, goes behind your back, what would you feel? That too, he falls in love with the same woman that you do and after knowing that you do. You feel like that sand castle has been burnt and turned into a glass one and while it is mesmerisingly beautiful and feels safe against high tides too, still broken into pieces. Doesn’t that feeling shatter you from within?

So, he needed Monisha, someone he never knew he shared a past with, who came into his life showcasing how that broken castle’s pieces had hurt not just him but everyone around him. His friend is happily married, but not to the person they both loved. His love of life never knew about the intensity of his love and he did not get a chance to know whether his love would have been reciprocated or not. Also, he humiliated a good man and similarly, he started distrusting his father’s emotions. His sister had to force him into a partnership with someone, somehow. For Monisha, this is not about who is perfect but about whom she wants to settle with. Does she go with the flow or does she want to determine how her life will be after entering into this partnership? She wanted to choose and determine. It is not about setting rules but about building trust in relationships. Rather than believing that you’re a bad person or a good person, you need to understand the consequences of your actions as well. She is like a river, carrying sediments from one part to another, enriching herself and the lives of other beings along her banks.

Does she have any flaws? She does. She doesn’t bother about how Sathya will contact her. She does not bother about how he might feel if she moves in with him. She doesn’t bother to invite him inside Balaji’s house or if Sathya has the same maturity as she does to accept and wait. She tries to be herself, but can she accept him as him? Slowly, but truly, she starts to fall for the true man Sathya is and not the facade he developed over the years. If you think about passionate love in our lives, if we had one, our partners should feel like this. They should be able to understand that we are capable of such intense love and hope for that from us. Instead, it often starts building insecurities, possessiveness and thereby obsession. Yes, it is hard to achieve, hence, it needs such a strong bond formed With Love.

While these are the ideas on paper and executed well in the majority of areas, the writing doesn’t feel strong enough to resonate with these high ideas with the same intensity. The comical approach did not dilute it, but the writing did not come up with even better sequences that grab your heart by hand. Take, for example, Balaji and Monisha’s silent tension, which tells you that he is the stalker right away. But the scene of confrontation doesn’t play out with the weight it should have. Not saying that Monisha could have slapped him harder or Balaji should have tried to be even more passionate that would be out of character for him. We need their scene to showcase the turmoil he felt over the years, unable to express his love or the scene should be a contrast to the Aneesha and Sathyaa scene, where emotions are reciprocated in a mature manner. Balaji thinks he still has a chance, but Monisha has started thinking about a life with Sathyaa. The difference needed to be prominent from Monisha’s perspective and this scene did not need diversion into Sathyaa’s vision, as people can easily predict how the movie would end. In Premalu [2024], you get that they both will fall in love, but when and how it would be expressed became the fun focal point. Here, that fun became random. Also, the build of trust scenes, where Monisha should not have been shown as a person in love who can easily forget or forgive, needed Sathya to understand where he crossed a line. Balaji and Sathya should have had an even better conversation for Sathya to let go and enter into his chaotic conscience again, feeling like a hero. Even Monisha’s conversations with Sathya, while fun, needed to explore more depth of understanding that they were building during the trip.

The moments are genuine and the intent is clear, with the basics being executed and nuances sprinkled all over. While the writing of Madhan lays a foundation, Anaswara and Abhishan’s chemistry builds a beautiful house, with the raw material adding to a cool, melancholic design, and Sean Roldan‘s music enhances the entire experience. It feels like a tasteful home tour that offers new scenic surprises at every corner, inviting us to explore even more. It is in the second hour that it starts to feel like, from that house, we are pushed into a lift that is stuck on the 5th floor while we need to go to the 10th floor. But this house could have been a better place where we might wish to live or be with those characters, like in Tourist Family [2025] and Good Night [2023]. It is fine to go into a cliched route, but freshness should not be replaced by engagement tactics. A few scenes feel twisted to serve such engagement farming or to make the auditorium laugh out loud. In the first hour, the design felt more organic, with interiors reflecting more depth. Anaswara Rajan once again proved that she is a stand out performer, owning every scene like only she can. Abhisan is good, and he proves to have a good range in playing similar emotions. Their chemistry holds together the house, as the ambition to deliver a laugh riot climax by Madhan almost made us not trust him. But with Love, he found a way to gain it back and make us feel welcome to stay in his house a little longer. Had he been more innovative in designing the more important rooms, the ending would have landed like the first moment when a sea wave touches our feet, as if welcoming us into a new heaven.

Theatrical Trailer: