Thaainilam review: A big heart, stretched very thin

Some sad films mistake accumulation for depth, and Thaainilam is a textbook case. Abhilash G. Devan’s debut drama has a story worth telling and its heart in the right place. What it lacks is anything to hold you between the tears it keeps asking for.

Sethuraman (Amar Ramachandran) loses his wife to the Sri Lankan civil war and crosses to Rameswaram with his young daughter Tamizhini (Neha Amar), hoping to get her educated in Tamil Nadu, maybe even make a doctor of her. A relative’s husband won’t take them in, police chase them off a bus stand, and employers and landlords lose interest the moment they hear where he’s from. He ends up camped in a disused bus shelter, selling vegetables off a cart.

None of this is untrue to what Eelam Tamil refugees lived through. But the film lays out these daily struggles flatly and never finds the image or the moment that lifts the grind into something that lingers. Plenty of films about the war have managed that. This one simply piles on the misery and waits for you to well up. Grief this real deserves a finer touch than a film that seems to be counting your sobs.

The better scenes are the gentler ones. A shopkeeper (Bala Singh) and the auto drivers nearby treat the pair with a casual decency that feels truer than any of the tragedy. You’d have to be made of stone not to feel for this father and daughter, and Ramachandran plays Sethuraman with a worn-down dignity that earns a few lumps in the throat.

Still, for a film that runs just 108 minutes, Thaainilam feels long, circling the same rejections until they lose their sting. That short runtime ends up being its biggest mercy. Technically, there’s little to single out.