Idhayam Murali review: a breezy, self-aware charmer

Some men will cross oceans for love but not the ten feet it takes to actually say it. Idhaya is that man, and Idhayam Murali spends a warm, silly, slightly overlong two and a half hours watching him fail to.

The film wears its heart in its title. Atharvaa’s father, the late Murali, once played Tamil cinema’s most famous tongue-tied romantic in Idhayam (1991), and the name has since become shorthand for the guy who loves and never confesses it. His son now plays a walking tribute to that archetype. Idhaya narrates his entire romantic history to a bemused stranger (Fahadh Faasil) while rushing to his own wedding, and the film rewinds through three decades of crushes he could never put into words. There is the schoolteacher he worshipped as a boy, the tuition-class girl who arrives with a genuinely clever twist, the college friend he lets slip away at a railway platform.

Aakash Baskaran, directing his first film, clearly grew up on the escapist romances of the nineties and early 2000s, and he rebuilds their textures with real affection.

The period detail is the film’s best trick, and it earns easy smiles.

That nostalgia carries a lot. Manoj Paramahamsa and CH Sai shoot Trichy, Madurai and even New York in warm, candy-bright frames, and the first half hums with the loose energy of a gang that genuinely feels like friends.

The comedy is where the film is most alive. The Parithabangal duo Sudhakar and Dravid Selvam land laughs with almost no effort, Thaman doubles as both composer and a very funny friend, and the ensemble is written with more care than films like this usually bother with. Best of all is Fahadh Faasil, whose self-aware cameo keeps calling out the story’s own daydream logic. Every time Idhayam Murali risks dissolving into pure sugar, he wanders in, raises an eyebrow at us, and somehow rescues the scene.

What the film never quite does is make you ache. Idhaya’s inability to speak up has no wound under it, no fear or buried history. He simply can’t, and the writing is not curious about why. The women drift in and out looking lovely with little to actually play, the second half sags under detours it does not need, and the climax reaches for a lump in the throat it has not earned. Atharvaa is genuinely good, selling the helplessness of a man forever one sentence behind his own life, yet the script keeps him at arm’s length from us. If you leave a little annoyed with Idhaya, that is arguably the point.

Taken as a feel-good hangout with a lovely cast and a soft spot for its own clichés, though, it mostly delivers. Idhayam Murali is a fairytale that would rather charm you than move you, and on a lazy afternoon, that turns out to be enough.