Chidambaram follows Manjummel Boys with a stranger, lonelier film: a mother and son outrunning their past by becoming new people. Farzana Palathingal is superb.

Chidambaram could have cashed in. After Manjummel Boys, the easy move was a bigger film with a bigger star. Instead he made Balan, the Tamil release of his Malayalam drama, and traded all that boys’-trip camaraderie for something quieter and far stranger: a mother and her young son surviving by becoming other people, drifting from one town and one borrowed identity to the next, always a step ahead of a past the film is careful not to hand you too early.

A young boy in a grey striped shirt stands in dim light, fidgeting with a plastic clip.

Adhisheshan KR’s younger Balan holds the screen with a gaze most child actors can’t manage.

We come in somewhere in the middle of their running, which is the point. Jithu Madhavan, pivoting hard from the goofball energy of Romancham and Aavesham, writes it as a series of lives rather than a plot. Each new place is its own short story, and the best of them, a stretch where the two move in to mind a gun-toting, foul-tempered old recluse, is as funny as it is unnerving. Shyju Khalid shoots in the same boxed-in frame as Manjummel Boys, the tall tree-lined paths pressing the boy into his own loneliness, while Sushin Shyam’s score stays low and uneasy, never once reaching for your tears.

A woman in a deep red dress and shawl stands among green trees, looking warily off-camera.

Trust her or don’t: Farzana plays the mother as a paradox you can never quite settle.

The performances are the find here. Farzana Palathingal, a stage actor making her debut, plays the mother as someone you trust and distrust in the same glance, fierce and resourceful with something harder buried underneath. The younger Balan (Adhisheshan KR) carries whole scenes on a gaze that does the work most child actors can’t.

A teenage boy in a faded printed shirt stands in a forest clearing holding a stick.

A time jump hands the role to an older Balan (Zinan), and the film turns inward.

It isn’t seamless. A jump into Balan’s older years (Zinan, very good with little) sends the back half drifting into character study, and the writing there feels less worked over than the first half’s tight grip. A few logic wrinkles nag. But the ending gathers it all back up and lands with real, earned feeling. A swerve worth taking.

Balan - The Boy review: Chidambaram's haunting swerve