Idhayam Murali: Atharvaa's quiet tribute to his father

Atharvaa Murali did not set out to build a monument. He set out to make a light, colourful love story, and somewhere in the making it became the closest thing he has to a letter for his father.

Idhayam Murali, which opened on July 10 and is still drawing full houses, borrows its name from Idhayam, the 1991 romance that starred Murali, Atharvaa’s father. When debut director Aakash Baskaran first floated the title, Atharvaa resisted it, more than once. Idhayam carries the weight of an aching, all-consuming romance in most people’s memory, and the film he was shooting was a breezy, featherlight one. “Trust me, brother, this will turn out well,” Aakash kept telling him. Nine days into a successful run, with our review calling it a breezy, self-aware charmer, Atharvaa can concede the director was right. “I wanted this title to be a small tribute to my father,” he said. “As a friend, Aakash pulled it off beautifully.”

The cast came together one last time to close out the promotions, and the mood was less a formal send-off than a class reunion. A cake in the middle of the room read Reunion in plain letters, and nobody had to explain why.

For a first-time director doubling as his own producer, Aakash assembled an unlikely spread of collaborators, and most of them said the same thing from the stage: this shoot did not feel like work. Atharvaa put a date on the journey, three and a half years from the first meeting to release, and traced the film’s whole texture back to how the set ran. “Some films need you to arrive fully prepared for every scene. This one didn’t. We’d turn up with an empty mind, talk the scene out there, sometimes rewrite the lines on the spot,” he said. Much of what landed on screen, he added, was improvised in the moment.

The night’s most repeated name was not a co-star but the composer. Thaman not only scored the film, he acted in it, his first time in front of a camera, and by several accounts he had to be talked into both. Cinematographer Manoj Paramahamsa, whom the younger cast nicknamed Headmaster, said he had known this story since 2018 and had spent years urging Aakash to produce it himself. “After the promo shoot in the US, working with big banners who gave a love story almost no priority, I told him the only way to make the film he imagined was to make it himself,” Manoj said. That decision, he argued, is the reason the film exists at all.

Thaman, for his part, framed the whole thing as a debt he was happy to owe. “Some chances come only once in a lifetime. Idhayam Murali is one of them,” he said. He recalled being sent a rough concept trailer, all CGI and hand-drawn frames, and deciding on the spot that he had to score it, then volunteering to act in it before anyone asked. There was a neat symmetry in it for him: his own first film as a composer was released by Think Music, the same label that put out Atharvaa’s debut Baana Kaathadi, which is why the whole project felt to several people in the room like a reunion rather than a launch.

Kayadu Lohar, for whom Idhayam Murali was the first Tamil film she signed, spoke about the character of Amudha with visible fondness, and about a gift she is clearly still touched by: a piano from Thaman. She has since moved on to leads in several films, including the upcoming Pallichattambi opposite Tovino Thomas, but she kept circling back to how this set felt like a family she wants to work with again. Preity Mukhundhan, who logged two and a half years on the film, said Aakash handed her the rare luxury of choosing between two roles, and that when she finally watched the finished film she did so as a fan rather than an actor.

Then there was Dravid, a YouTuber before this, who came aboard as an actor and stayed on as assistant director and dialogue writer. He said he can now split his life cleanly into before Idhayam Murali and after. “I was someone who only existed on YouTube. Today people call me a cinema person,” he said, and the room, full of people who had watched him do it, believed him.

What kept surfacing across every speech was Thaman’s stubborn faith in the film. Whenever Atharvaa had a doubt during the long shoot, he said, he would take it to the composer and get the same two-word answer. “Blockbuster. Blockbuster.” At some point the cast started believing him. There is a WhatsApp group named after the film, and Aakash once messaged it at five in the evening to say he no longer knew what to do with his day now that the shoot was over. Everyone in the group, Atharvaa said, felt exactly the same emptiness.

That, more than the box office, was what the afternoon kept coming back to. A debut director who refused to compromise on a small film, a composer who talked a whole team into believing it would work, and a cast that walked in as strangers and left as a group that still eats lunch together. The film gave Atharvaa a tribute to his father. It gave everyone else each other.