Hridayam movie review: An overlong Premam meets shades of Arjun Reddy meets under-written women

Language: Malayalam with English, Tamil and some Hindi Whatever else it is or is not, Hridayam is certainly pretty. Beyond the gloss – very appealing gloss, I must add – Vineeth Sreenivasan’s Hridayam is yet another film about a man and under-written women. Between settling down in his new environs and rebelling against ragging, he falls in love with his college-mate Darshana at first glance – because she smiles a fulsome, teeth-baring smile that travels up to her eyes and her hair flutters in the breeze while music plays in the background in the specific way women’s hair flutters in the breeze only in films. For instance, when Arun beats up Darshana’s womanising ex to protect her from him, and she tells him he is no better than that man, Hridayam seems headed towards an examination of men’s proprietorial attitude towards women, but that point goes nowhere. Even as the second half of Hridayam paints Arun as a stand-up guy, it caricatures women as nags that good men are forced to manipulate – the grouchy, dissatisfied, suspicious wife, the interfering mother, the termagant of a mother-in-law… Malayalam cinema is sometimes guilty of othering north Indians and Tamilians, but Hridayam heads off in another direction.