Heartin Pitches a Love Story Where the Hero Falls for Two Women, and Means It

The cleanest summary of Heartin came from its creative consultant, not its marketing. Most love stories ask whether you should love one person or choose between two, Manimegalai said; this one asks something simpler and stranger, whether you should love at all. That is the hook the team kept circling at the film’s audio and trailer launch in Chennai: a romance with a twist sitting underneath the sweetness, where the hero ends up loving two women and the film asks you to take it seriously rather than play it for farce.

A romantic entertainer marking the debut of Sananth as a lead and Kishore Kumar as a director, Heartin is produced by Trident Arts R Ravindran and Step One Studios, and reaches theatres worldwide on June 26. Sananth said the title fits the film, cute and breezy on the surface, but that working on it showed him the layers underneath, a deeper feeling than the conventional love story he first assumed he had signed. He went in expecting one heroine, he joked, and found he had two, loving both across the film, a confusion he thinks the audience will feel along with him.

Madonna Sebastian, who leads opposite him, said she came aboard because the script genuinely won her over. She has seen plenty of love stories, she said, but this one carries a difference she hopes viewers will feel, and asked families to come watch it together on the 26th. Kishore, making his first stage appearance as a director, traced his wish to work with her back to her performance in Kaadhalum Kadandhu Pogum, and said he narrated the idea to her across a forty-minute pitch she immediately took to.

Kishore made a point of bringing his short-film collaborators into his first feature, casting people like Ajith Koshy and Varghese Mathew in smaller parts, and crediting newcomer Emaya T with much of why the film’s women are written as complex and emotional rather than decorative. Varghese, for his part, described his role with a grin, not the policeman’s uniform people expect from him but a wealthy father who mails pickles and sun-dried fixings to his child, a small part with its own flavour. Editor Bharath Vikraman called the film one of his favourites, praising how cinematographer Mukesh visually separated the story’s two worlds and how Rajesh Murugesan’s music fused them into something he called magic.

Composer Rajesh Murugesan said Heartin is special to him as a film he worked on with unusual freedom, packing in five songs written by Sarathi, Vivek and Mohan Rajan. Kishore’s closing argument was the one the whole campaign rests on: relationships keep inventing new labels, situationships and the rest, but love as an emotion never dates, and Heartin is his attempt to hold a youthful, evergreen version of it on screen. The film opens worldwide on June 26.