Premalu’s biggest LOL moment takes place when the romance tries to address the biggest problem we see with its predecessors. In a clever bit of self-referentiality, it acknowledges its protagonist’s stalker-ly tendencies and uses that information to deliver on a joke that uses wordplay to replace stalking with stock-market investing. It’s exactly as silly as it sounds, but when Naslen plants this line with an incredible amount of conviction, you remember how a film needn’t apply a holier-than-thou attitude, even when it tries to be politically correct.
This is one of the many little things that add up to make what we can now call the Girish AD signature. The director of much-loved Thaneer Mathan Dinangal and Super Sharanya, finds comedy in the mundane and love in all the places we’ve seen before. Come to think of it, there’s a certain cleverness hidden beneath its title too, given how it’s what Malayalis think the word for ‘love’ is in Telugu. What gives an otherwise generic love story this edge is the fact that it’s set in Hyderabad, a place that’s super under-utilised in Malayalam cinema. And then when the writers populate this world with a group of absolutely loveable characters, each scene feels like a revelation.