mili movie review in tamil

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Janhvi Kapoor as a woman stuck in a freezer fighting to stay alive. 'Mili' is the official Hindi remake of the Malayalam thriller 'Helen'. Janhvi Kapoor as a woman stuck in a freezer fighting to stay alive. 'Mili' is the official Hindi remake of the Malayalam thriller 'Helen'. Janhvi Kapoor as a woman stuck in a freezer fighting to stay alive. 'Mili' is the official Hindi remake of the Malayalam thriller 'Helen'.

• Mathukutty Xavier
• Janhvi Kapoor
• Manoj Pahwa
• Sunny Kaushal
• 58 User reviews
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• Mili Naudiyal

• Niranjan Naudiyal

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• Nov 9, 2022
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• November 4, 2022 (India)
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• Runtime 2 hours 7 minutes

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Mili Review: Janhvi Kapoor's Film Keeps The Audience Glued To The Screen

Mili review: it has its moments and a pivotal performance that demonstrates that janhvi kapoor is an actress who has the chops to carry an entire film on her shoulders..

Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Sunny Kaushal, Manoj Pahwa

Director: Mathukutty Xavier

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Considering how faithful this repeat act is, one might wonder why director Mathukutty Xavier would have spotted any value at all in helming a Hindi remake of Helen , his own critically lauded 2019 Malayalam survival drama. Mili , co-produced by Boney Kapoor, attempts no significant deviation from the original screenplay.

The setting and some key plot details have been tweaked but in essence Mili treads the path that Helen did. But despite this being the third iteration of the thriller - a Tamil version (Anbirkiniyal) came out last year - the Janhvi Kapoor starrer is a highly watchable, if not scintillating, film.

The lead actress' solid showing in the role of a nursing graduate who is inadvertently locked in a freezer and struggles to stave off hyperthermia is what holds Mili together. Members of the supporting cast, which includes Manoj Pahwa and Sunny Kaushal, are in their elements too. The writing and the acting apart, Mili benefits appreciably from its steadfast eschewal of the superfluous.

The director, working with a script adapted for Hindi movie audiences by Ritesh Shah, imparts sustained intensity and urgency to the girl's fight for survival and the despairing efforts of her father and friends to locate her. The result is a film that keeps the audience glued to the screen in spite of the fact that parts of it could have done with a tighter edit.

Mili is first and foremost a father-daughter story. Janhvi Kapoor plays Mili Naudiyal, a 24-year-old who lives with her doting single dad, Niranjan Naudiyal (Manoj Pahwa), in a quiet middle-class Dehradun neighbourhood. The girl works in a fast-food outlet in a shopping mall while she prepares for an upcoming IELTS test. Mili hopes to migrate to Canada and make a mark as a nurse there.

Niranjan and Mili cannot understandably do without each other, but the man does not stand in the way of his daughter's decision to leave him and their small town behind in search of greener pastures. Although their life seems largely uneventful, father and daughter do have a thing or two that they conceal from each other. One of the secrets has a direct bearing on how things pan out for Mili.

Niranjan smokes on the sly and has cigarettes hidden all over their home. When Mili finds out, she puts her foot down and demands that he kick the habit forthwith. The man promises never to smoke again provided he is allowed a last puff. Mili accepts the deal. They return to their daily routine.

The secret that Mili keeps from her father is far more combustive. She is in love with a jobless man, Sameer Kumar (Sunny Kaushal), who, as is implied in a couple of throwaway lines, belongs to a different caste. (In Helen, the girl is a Christian, the boy a Muslim. The religious divide is kept out of the frame here. Mili also refrains from playing up the caste angle, not that it matters in the overall context of what the film is about).

To return to the storyline, Mili intends to keep her affair with Sameer under wraps until he lands a job - a move that indirectly leads to the life-and-death crisis that befalls her. Trapped in a freezer where the temperature goes as low as -17 degrees Celsius, she stares death in the face with no likelihood of a rescue act being mounted before it is too late.

For her distraught father, finding and saving her becomes a race against time and a battle against the town's policing system. None of Mili's colleagues know where she could have gone after work. The local police station, headed by a smarmy, lethargic sub-inspector Satish Rawat (Anurag Arora), isn't particularly eager to extend any help to a troubled father and his worried neighbours.

Mili is a film executed with sustained control. It neither pulsates with crackling energy nor overflows with plot twists, but it does not waver in terms of its focus on the girl in distress and on how her disappearance impacts her father. It also does well to capture the small-town milieu without overdoing it.

Not that the film harps on it, but the protagonist has two cocoons to reckon with - her home and the town itself. Neither is obviously inimical to her - in fact, they sustain her emotionally - but she desires to break free and explore the wider world. The freezer in the fast-food joint, in a way, serves as an extreme representation of what is a physical cage for an ambitious girl reined in by her life, her environs and her circumstances.

The freezer scenes give Janhvi Kapoor the scope to go the whole distance as an actress. While the make-up comes in handy here she is impressively steady. The heroine tries everything that she can to stay alive. The situation worsens by the minute even as her own nursing skills give her a chance of survival, however slim, in life-threatening conditions that she has no way of fully controlling.

Manoj Pahwa, playing a father at the end of his tether, delivers a performance marked by striking restraint. Even when the alarm bells begin to ring and matters spiral out of control, the actor does not resort to outward methods to express the turmoil raging within in. He allows the situation to determine the performative parameters.

Sunny Kaushal, cast as the boyfriend who is in the line of fire when Mili goes missing without a trace, plays second fiddle in a film that centres squarely on the heroine. He does not let that undermine what he brings to the table. The role has sufficient meat and he makes the most of it.

Mili would have been infinitely sharper and more gripping had it been somewhat shorter. At a little over two hours, it isn't exactly an overlong film, but given the nature of the emergency that the protagonist's accidental confinement sparks - it limits the film to a closed space for the most part - some bits of it feel a touch inessential.

But all said and done, Mili is one remake that is anything but unnecessary. It has its moments and a pivotal performance that demonstrates that Janhvi Kapoor is an actress who has the chops to carry an entire film on her shoulders when she has the screenwriter on her side.

• Cast Janhvi Kapoor, Sunny Kaushal, Manoj Pahwa

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Mili Review: Janhvi Kapoor’s Most Impressive Performance So Far

Director : Mathukutty Xavier

Writers : Mathukutty Xavier, Noble Babu Thomas, Alfred Kurian Joseph, Ritesh Shah

Cast : Janhvi Kapoor, Manoj Pahwa, Sunny Kaushal, Anurag Arora, Sanjay Suri

Mathukutty Xavier’s Mili , the Hindi remake of his Malayalam hit Helen (2019), is reimagined in Dehradun. The premise is innovative. The night shift at a fast-food joint turns into a nightmare for a part-time employee, Mili, who gets trapped in its cold storage. With the restaurant closed till the next morning, the 24-year-old nursing graduate is in danger of freezing to death. Her struggle to stay alive is interspersed with the frantic search led by her single father and boyfriend.

As a survival thriller alone, Mili is high-pitched and mostly effective. The sound design is terrific, simulating an endless cycle of danger and dread. The dull roar of the freezer is almost imperceptible until the narrative cuts to the outside. Minutes later, this freezer feels soothing in comparison to the quiet chaos of the search. The visual transitions are smart and well-timed. A table fan in a police station looks more ominous than the shot of the giant freezer blades that precedes it; the former conveys a broken system, while the latter can, at worst, be a broken machine. The tight close-ups of the girl’s withering face are excessive, but the rhythm of the editing creates a sharp psychological pull, where the world as she knows it is reduced to the sum of her movements. In contrast, those looking for her are reduced to the tally of their thoughts.

Some of the film’s cheesy metaphors make sense, albeit in a heat-of-the-moment manner. Mili is in a ‘cold’ war with her father and boyfriend when she gets trapped. Of all the things he could have done for a living, her father sells insurance. Mili’s proximity towards a rat echoes her father’s changing attitude towards her boyfriend – a lower-caste, irresponsible but eventually misunderstood creature – on the outside. Mili’s paranoia about her father’s smoking habit finds heartbreaking circularity in the fact that every breath of hers is now visible. Mili’s situation also doubles up as a dramatic forecast of her future – she is planning to migrate to the notoriously cold Canada, alone, without her father. A shot of her in the foetal position hints at the infantilisation of her quest in the days leading up to this. It helps that Janhvi Kapoor ’s fourth author-backed role of a short career is perhaps her most impressive so far. As was the case with Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl (2020), Kapoor’s disarming ambition to be a better actor mirrors Mili’s desire to respect her own privilege – and sheltered childhood – without being defined by it. In her hands, Mili becomes someone who is learning to speak English not to break free or transcend her setting; it is to nourish her roots further by acquiring newer languages of loving and caring. Her independence is almost incidental; she doesn’t want to escape her cocoon so much as expand it.

Not everything works, though. Xavier milks the genre for all its worth. The girl’s physical journey, for instance, borders on torture porn. A dislocated ankle, a torn elbow and frostbitten cheeks make her portions a harrowing watch. It feels a tad exploitative, not too different from assault sequences that derive meaning from the suffering of the female body. The film-making dials up the Nineties’ villainy of the bad cop character (Anurag Arora); his staging is too obvious. And while the good cop is a winning idea on paper, Sanjay Suri plays him with the quasi-comical stuffiness of a drill sergeant. The writing replaces the religious context of Helen , but fails to mine the caste consciousness of Uttarakhand. Some of the suspense devices, too, are designed purely to toy with the viewers. Like A.R. Rahman ’s overarching background score. Like the flowery flashbacks. Like cell phones running out of battery at inopportune moments; or the one character who’s figured out Mili’s location having an accident. Or most of all, like the star cameo that instantly pulls us out of the (true) story. A lot of it is sensory button-pushing, aimed at ratcheting up the pressure by hook or crook – but at what cost?

The essence of Mili , however, has little to do with its status as a survival thriller. At its core, the film is a slow-burning sociocultural drama. Mili – meaning “found” in Hindi, but also “virtuous” in Hebrew – is a girl defined by her virtues. She pursues nursing abroad to pay off the debts of her middle-class father (a moving Manoj Pahwa). She urges him to be more health-conscious. She wants her boyfriend, Sameer (Sunny Kaushal), to stop slacking and get a job so that she can proudly introduce him to her father. She is the only one who notices – and acknowledges – the mall security guard every morning. She even stops to pray at a temple after her shift every night. But the lurking wolves – a chauvinistic policeman and manager, a creepy auto driver – test Mili’s naivete, forcing her to resemble a new-age Red Riding Hood in her restaurant uniform. By the time she’s trapped behind a metal door in sub-zero temperatures with chunks of meat for company, the life-or-death crisis pales in comparison to the crisis of morality on the outside. You want her to be rescued because she’s human, but you also want her to be enclosed in this ‘safe’ space a little longer because she’s a woman.

The murky relationship between morality and gender shapes the central conflict of the story. The reason most movies with stranded protagonists don’t zoom out from their survival dynamic is because the world seldom realizes – or has the time to realize – their absence. If it’s a man, as it so often is, at best he’s had an accident and at worst he’s dead. But when a young woman goes missing in a country like India, her character is the first thing that’s brought into focus. When Mili doesn’t return home, on one hand it’s her chaste nature – that unerring routine, her inability to deviate from schedule – that compels her father to start searching in an hour. He insists that, no matter how upset she is, she would never “do such a thing” – a phrase that implies either self-harm or toxic influence. On the other hand, he attacks her boyfriend, convinced that he has something to do with her disappearance. For a while, he is no different from the cop who crudely raises questions about her ‘affair', the manager who taunts her or the self-righteous neighbour who fears for her mental balance.

I’m on the fence about sticking Mili in a freezer to cure the gaze of the men who surround her. An idealistic way to approach this is to ask: Why punish a woman to reform the patriarchy she resists? Mili’s brutal battle becomes a character certificate to her father, who mistook her courage to live as a sign of moral rebellion. At some level, the prospect of his daughter being stuck in an elevator or cold store is considerably less troubling than other scenarios. In terms of the film’s simplistic reading of tradition versus youth, it’s a bit like watching Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge ’s Chaudhary Baldev Singh joining forces with the rakish Raj to look for Simran (who’s probably trapped on a train in a deserted rail yard). Sameer even rocks a similar monologue about how Mili would never betray her sanskari upbringing.

But the pragmatic way to approach this is to admit: It is invariably the woman who sacrifices herself to unite her loved ones. Our emotional investment depends on whether we expect a film to reflect a reality or revise a truth. The difference is that Mili reclaims the agency – and moral identity – of tragedy. Acting on her own terms would have involved the choice to get provoked by the people that weaken her. But by being a survival thriller about a girl who is accidentally trapped due to the careless actions of men, the film proves the world wrong about her. And by fetishizing her battle – against all odds, luck, chance, fate – Mili frees its protagonist from the chilling box she’s confined to. After all, it’s not Mili and Helen who need to be found; it’s the perpetual search for their virtue that needs to be lost.

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Mili movie review: Janhvi Kapoor's survival thriller has a warm heart, chilling race against time

Mili movie review: janhvi kapoor plays the perfect girl from dehradun who gets locked in a freezer overnight even as his family looks for her..

Mili movie review:

Janhvi Kapoor has aced the art of selecting the right movies so early in her career. She has so far led a host of films that are simple in scope, but well made, and absolutely watchable. Same cannot be said about most of her peers and even a few seniors, who are still playing accessories to rowdy heroes and third fiddles in multi-starrers. Meanwhile, Janhvi is keeping busy minting a genre of her own: the girl next door who gets caught up in difficult jobs (Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, Good Luck Jerry, Ghost Stories) or difficult situations (Roohi, Mili). The latest in the order is Mathukutty Xavier's Mili, a thoroughly entertaining albeit simple remake of Malayalam film Helen, and inspired by the real story of a girl who gets locked in a freezer. (Also read: Double XL movie review: Sonakshi Sinha, Huma Qureshi star in an empty, exhausting lecture masquerading as a movie )

Janhvi plays Mili, with a BSc in nursing and dreams of working in Canada someday. She is the ideal daughter to her dad (played by the ever dependable Manoj Pahwa), chasing after him and his cigarettes when not licking through her IELTS books, romancing her boyfriend (played by the sweet and charming Sunny Kaushal) or working night shifts at a local burger joint. The first 30 minutes are spent on establishing Mili as the perfect girl who smiles at mall watchmen and visits temples daily. While it did seem a bit too sugary to digest, you mostly forget it once the latch to the freezer closes and the survival drama kicks in. And later, like a good, tightly written thriller, all the smiling and temple-hopping are shown to have had a purpose all along. Despite the delayed arrival of real, meaty action, Xavier doesn't seem to have wasted any frame on frivolous pursuits. The romance is given just ample room and so is the father-daughter relationship: enough to let it hurt when Pahwa breaks into tears at the fear of losing his daughter.

The scenes inside the freezer are even better. A massive fan looms large in the centre of the room, booming loudly and instilling the same dread as a monster baring its teeth in front of its prey. The entire geography or full length and breadth of the room are never shown, inspiring more confusion. The cold white tubelights are anyway one of the most depressing elements created by man and the icy winds help further in setting the mood for some literal chills.

As time progresses, so does Janhvi's excellent Smurfette-inspired makeup. Her blood vessels pop through her face, that become deep dark blue by the end. The injuries, the broken bones, the peeling skin are all enough to make you wince and sometimes, even scream along with her. And what was most important is that Janhvi doesn't overdo it with the 'brrrs' and 'ssshhhhs'. Her performance is contained and still throughly believable as she finds different ways to survive inside the freezer, fails and tries again. It is perhaps just in the initial scenes where she is preparing for IELTS and even her ‘gadbad’ English feels too perfectly messed up to be authentic. She can apparently speak perfectly well with foreigners in English but needs to see a book about how a cup cannot sit ‘in’ the table.

But all of this is easily and quickly ignored for the room you are asked to make for the warmth of Mili. Inside the freezer, Mili finds her own 'Wilson', in a rat she mistakenly let into the freezer the previous day. The two become buddies and pin it on some exceptional acting from the rat but it's all truly heartwarming for us and stabilising for a plot that really needed a break from all the frantic search for the girl and her attempts to break out. There are more wholesome moments courtesy a mindful guard, a diligent cop and a divine intervention by a Bollywood star's cameo. I will not reveal more on who it is because I appreciate how for once, a cameo in a Bollywood movie isn't plastered all over social media by the producers themselves ahead of release.

Mili is a fuss free, entertaining, simple and just thrilling enough ride. Of course, it doesn't have the lure of CGI spectacles, fighter jets, flawless heroes and glamorous heroines, it still deserves a watch.

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‘Mili’ review: A nail-biting survival drama

Mathukutty xavier’s remake of his malayalam-language ‘helen’ stars janhvi kapoor, manoj pahwa and sunny kaushal..

Mathukutty Xavier’s Mili is a faithful remake of his Malayalam-language 2019 film Helen and all the better for it. About the only new detail in the Hindi version is a bunch of pleasant songs and a background score by AR Rahman.

Before it slides into do-or-die mode, the screenplay by Xavier, Alfred Kurian Joseph and Noble Babu Thomas sets up the two relationships that define Dehradun resident Mili (Janhvi Kapoor). The first is with her widower father Niranjan (Manoj Pahwa), to whom she is devoted. The other is with her boyfriend Sameer (Sunny Kaushal), whom her father knows nothing about.

For reasons not clear, Mili has abandoned nursing and is working as a lowly cashier at a take-out in a mall. Her boss Sudhir (Vikram Kochhar) is rude and exploitative, but his behaviour pales before that of the odious inspector Satish (Anurag Arora).

After Mili gets trapped in a freezer in the restaurant and her whereabouts are unknown for several hours, Niranjan and Sameer set out to look for her. Satish’s obnoxiousness is both an example of police excesses as well as a ploy to stretch out Mili’s plight.

Xavier’s script deftly dots the Is and crosses the Ts. No detail is wasted, whether it is Niranjan’s smoking habit or the convict at the police station who is frequently described as a desperado.

One cameo is by one of Hindi cinema’s coolest cats. The other guest, who offers further proof of Mili’s innate humanity even in a life-threatening crisis, isn’t even human.

Ranjith Ambady’s outstanding make-up (which won him a National Film Award for Helen ) transforms Mili from a fresh-faced young woman into a candidate for hypothermia. Shivering in low temperatures, affected by frost-bite and with no help in sight, Mili is a vision as she struggles to stay alive.

Apurwa Sondhi’s production design updates M Bava’s stellar efforts in converting the freezer room into a battleground. The journey from Malayalam to Hindi is largely intact, down to the false alarms and the denouement that takes too long. Having hooked us early on and cleverly strung us for the bulk of 129 nail-biting minutes, Xavier can’t resist playing with our feelings just a bit longer.

The Hindi version lowers its risk in one important respect. The inter-faith romance that upsets Helen’s father in the original film has been replaced with a relatively safer option: Mili and Sameer are from different castes.

The human touch that raises the stakes in a routine survival drama is present in Manoj Pahwa’s moving performance as Mili’s father, Sunny Kaushal’s stolid concern for Mili, and Janhvi Kapoor’s doughty turn as the heroine. The original film depended strongly on Malayalam actor Anna Ben’s talent for evoking purity of heart and strength of character.

Kapoor too infuses Mili with innocence and vulnerability. Both these qualities, also present in Kapoor’s performances in Gunjan Saxena and Good Luck Jerry , steer Mili through its sub-zero highs and minor lows.

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Mili Movie Review

Mili Devesh Sharma , Nov 6, 2022, 17:10 IST

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'Mili', a palpable survival drama powered by an earnest act Janhvi Kapoor

With years of experience in watching mysteries unfold on our screens, we know by now that the biggest revelations are hidden within the smallest details. Janhvi Kapoor’s Mili, the Hindi remake of Malayalam film Helen, also follows this template. We see how in a self-centered world, even the tiniest gesture of kindness can go a long way. The film also reminds us how adults are self-absorbed in their lives, and opening up our minds for even the briefest of moments can be life-changing. Mili briefly, but pivotally plays with these moments, to give us a peek into the bigger picture.

Mili (Jahnvi Kapoor) is a 24-year-old nursing graduate and a part-time restaurant worker, who aspires to migrate from Dehradun to Canada for better living standards. Soon after this, we get to see a brief summary of what is going to happen. The camera angle follows an ant’s trail as it ends up falling inside an ice tray. But before this happens to Mili, we are introduced to the world she is living in. We see her attend IELTS classes, taking care of her widowed father Naudiyal (Manoj Pahwa), and her unemployed boyfriend Sameer (Sunny Kaushal).

The first half has several moments that give away something that the audience can latch on to. For example, there is a scene involving Mili, her father, and Sameer, inside a theatre, where the father murmurs that he is better off watching dubbed Telugu films than watching a presumably Hindi film. Is it a nonchalant sarcastic commentary from director Mathukutty Xavier (who also helmed Helen) on the current industry trends where South Indian films are faring better in the Northern belt? On a serious note, we also see some passing references to Sameer coming from the oppressed caste in this caste-ridden society, which Naudiyal is very much part of.

The latter even asks his daughter to make friends from their “own” groups. While such commentaries are just passing references to suggest Mili’s world, one thing is made sure in the first half. The men around Mili are against her decision to migrate. Mili also lives in a society where men are in charge of protection, and we see the ingrained misogyny in police officer Satish Rawat, who is supposed to be the protector of justice. Rawat terms Mili’s relationship as an “affair” and deems her unfit to be on her own, and wants to “give” her back to the father.

Mathukutty barely scratches all these issues before stepping into the real quest where Mili accidentally gets locked within the cold storage unit of the restaurant. Before enduring the cold temperatures of the storage unit, Mili faces the chilling realities of daily life. The second half goes into survival drama mode. Filled with tight shots of her frost bites, bruised body, Mili sometimes dangerously steps into the zone of torture porn.

Yes, the close-up shots work to show the claustrophobic nature of Mili’s situation, but after a point, the constant shots of her tattered skin and scrapped arm feel a bit too much. While Janhvi single-handedly steals the show with her earnest performance, Mili does suffer from inconsistency in trying to balance the already-troubled world of the girl and her near-death experience.

It tries to unpack several things at once. Does it speak up against the perceived notions we have while othering people? Is it a commentary on a woman having her own wishes and choices in a man’s world? Is it about the growing corporate structure that exploits its labours? Or is it about Mili’s resilience to withstand the harshest temperatures, but unable to do so in the real world of complex human emotions? The film doesn’t stick to a stand but offers multiple possibilities for every question without really zeroing in on a solution. And given this is Mathukutty’s second outing with the same story, we expect some gaps to be filled and take it a notch up higher than the original.

Nevertheless, Mili is backed by a powerful plot and fairly decent execution. Janhvi makes Mili come to life with her mature acting, and Sunny plays his part well. There is also an adorable rodent that wins all our hearts. While the irony of Mili, who has aspirations of moving to the harsh winds of cold Canada, getting locked in a cold storage unit, is not lost upon us, the film offers a warm reminder of her resilience to the coldest of temperatures inside the storage, and coldest of behaviours encountered in the society. Did she come out of the unit? Did she go to Canada? The answers are best found in the air-conditioned halls of a theatre.

Starring: Janhvi Kapoor, Sunny Kaushal, Manoj Pawha Director: Mathukutty Xavier

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Mili movie review: Janhvi Kapoor stands out in this nail-biting survival drama

Updated Nov 4, 2022, 10:39 IST

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Mili FIRST Review: Janhvi Kapoor-Sunny Kaushal manage to serve the thrills in survival drama? Find out

Mili first review: janhvi kapoor and sunny kaushal star in the survival thriller mili, which is the remake of the malayalam hit helen (2019). know what to expect from the bollywood film..

Mili: What is the movie about? 

Mili is directed by Mathukutty Xavier and produced by Janhvi Kapoor's father Boney Kapoor. The film stars Janhvi, Sunny Kaushal and Manoj Pahwa. A remake of the director's own 2019 Malayalam film Helen, Mili follows the titular character, played by Janhvi, stuck in a freezer fighting to stay alive as the temperature drops every hour. Janhvi said that she shot for the movie for straight 20 days inside a freezer in minus 15 degree temperature.

Read:  Hrithik Roshan turns romantic poet for girlfriend Saba Azad on her birthday, see Instagram post  

Mili First review: How good is the film?  

Mili has a different storyline than fans are used to seeing in Bollywood. The film has been screened abroad for the censor board and Umair Sandhu shared his first review of Mili on social media on Tuesday. He has praised lead actress Janhvi's performance on whose shoulder the film is resting. If the film is indeed good, Janhvi will have proved that she can lead the film on her own and that is a welcome sign for the producers and her fans. Umair also called Mili a 'chilling thriller'. 

Umair wrote about Mili, "Wow ! What a Chilling Thriller #Mili !!! Loved it ! #JanhviKapoor is in Terrific form (sic)."

Mili to clash with Phone Bhoot

On November 4, Mili and Phone Bhoot, starring Katrina Kaif , Ishaan Khatter and Siddhant Chaturvedi, will be released. They will be competing neck to neck for the audience. Phone Bhoot is a horror comedy and has a very different tone when compared to Mili. It will be interesting to see which of the two leads at the box office. 

Read:  Phone Bhoot FIRST review: Katrina Kaif fails to impress audience? Know what critics have to say

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Mili Movie Review: A palpable survival drama powered by an earnest act Janhvi Kapoor

Rating: ( 2.5 / 5).

With years of experience in watching mysteries unfold on our screens, we know by now that the biggest revelations are hidden within the smallest details. Janhvi Kapoor's  Mili , the Hindi remake of Malayalam film Helen,  also follows this template. We see how in a self-centered world, even the tiniest gesture of kindness can go a long way. The film also reminds us how adults are self-absorbed in their lives, and opening up our minds for even the briefest of moments can be life-changing.  Mili briefly, but pivotally plays with these moments, to give us a peek into the bigger picture. 

Mili (Jahnvi Kapoor) is a 24-year-old nursing graduate and a part-time restaurant worker, who aspires to migrate from Dehradun to Canada for better living standards. Soon after this, we get to see a brief summary of what is going to happen. The camera angle follows an ant’s trail as it ends up falling inside an ice tray. But before this happens to Mili, we are introduced to the world she is living in. We see her attend IELTS classes, taking care of her widowed father Naudiyal (Manoj Pahwa), and her unemployed boyfriend Sameer (Sunny Kaushal). The first half has several moments that give away something that the audience can latch on to. For example, there is a scene involving Mili, her father, and Sameer, inside a theatre, where the father murmurs that he is better off watching dubbed Telugu films than watching a presumably Hindi film. Is it a nonchalant sarcastic commentary from director Mathukutty Xavier (who also helmed Helen ) on the current industry trends where South Indian films are faring better in the Northern belt? On a serious note, we also see some passing references to Sameer coming from the oppressed caste in this caste-ridden society, which Naudiyal is very much part of. The latter even asks his daughter to make friends from their “own” groups. While such commentaries are just passing references to suggest Mili’s world, one thing is made sure in the first half. The men around Mili are against her decision to migrate. Mili also lives in a society where men are in charge of protection, and we see the ingrained misogyny in police officer Satish Rawat, who is supposed to be the protector of justice. Rawat terms Mili’s relationship as an “affair” and deems her unfit to be on her own, and wants to "give" her back to the father.

Director: Mathukutty Xavier

Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Sunny Kaushal, Manoj Pawha 

Mattukutty barely scratches all these issues before stepping into the real quest where Mili accidentally gets locked within the cold storage unit of the restaurant. Before enduring the cold temperatures of the storage unit, Mili faces the chilling realities of daily life. The second half goes into survival drama mode. Filled with tight shots of her frost bites, bruised body, Mili sometimes dangerously steps into the zone of torture porn. Yes, the close-up shots work to show the claustrophobic nature of Mili’s situation, but after a point, the constant shots of her tattered skin and scrapped arm feel a bit too much. While Janhvi single-handedly steals the show with her earnest performance,  Mili does suffer from inconsistency in trying to balance the already-troubled world of the girl and her near-death experience. It tries to unpack several things at once. Does it speak up against the perceived notions we have while othering people? Is it a commentary on a woman having her own wishes and choices in a man’s world? Is it about the growing corporate structure that exploits its labours? Or is it about Mili’s resilience to withstand the harshest temperatures, but unable to do so in the real world of complex human emotions? The film doesn't stick to a stand but offers multiple possibilities for every question without really zeroing in on a solution. And given this is Mathukutty’s second outing with the same story, we expect some gaps to be filled and take it a notch up higher than the original.

Nevertheless, Mili is backed by a powerful plot and fairly decent execution. Janhvi makes Mili come to life with her mature acting, and Sunny plays his part well. There is also an adorable rodent that wins all our hearts. While the irony of Mili, who has aspirations of moving to the harsh winds of cold Canada, getting locked in a cold storage unit, is not lost upon us, the film offers a warm reminder of her resilience to the coldest of temperatures inside the storage, and coldest of behaviours encountered in the society. Did she come out of the unit? Did she go to Canada? The answers are best found in the air-conditioned halls of a theatre.

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‘Mili’ movie review: This showreel of Janhvi Kapoor stutters after a compelling start 

Director mathukutty xavier, who directed the original malayalam version ‘helen’, scores once again in pulling at our heart strings and bringing us to the edge of our seats with the way he builds up the story.

Updated - November 04, 2022 01:45 pm IST

Janhvi Kapoor in a still from the movie ‘Mili’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

A remake of the Malayalam film  Helen , Mili  is a tense survivor drama that manages to spur an emotional upheaval caused by its central conceit, but fails to sustain it. With the original film and a tell-all trailer already in public space, the film’s premise is no longer a surprise and it reduces the what and why of the narrative to just how. Still, director Mathukutty Xavier, who directed the original Malayalam version, scores once again in pulling at our heart strings and bringing us to the edge of our seats with the way he builds up the story.

Mili Naudiyal (Janhvi Kapoor) lives with her father in Dehradun. A trained nurse, she aspires to go abroad, and in the meantime, works at a food joint in a mall. The shift from Kerala to Uttarakhand is convincing as both the states have a strong presence in the paramedical and hospitality industry. Like the Mili of 1975, she brings cheer around her. She has a strong bond with her father (Manoj Pahwa) who has single-handedly raised her and is in a romantic relationship with an enterprising but unemployed Sameer (Sunny Kaushal) who doesn’t belong to her caste.

On an emotionally-difficult day, Mili gets unknowingly locked in the freezer of the shop; how she escapes forms the rest of the story.

She is improving with every author-backed (or we can producer father-backed) role, but Janhvi is still a work in progress . She is endearing in the bittersweet moments with Pahwa and looks the part of a simple yet feisty girl. But when it comes to generating warmth without words in a cold space, Janhvi flounders. She also needs to work on her voice modulation, as it lacks clarity in scenes that emotionally stretches her.

After a taut build-up, one realises that the screenplay is riddled with just too many coincidences and there is an utter predictability in the proceedings inside and outside the freezer. There are no red herrings around to keep us engaged, and A.R. Rahman’s music doesn’t add much to the atmosphere.

What sustains the momentum are the moments and performances of the supporting actors; the doubt over Sameer’s credibility, the little inside story of the manager (Vikram Kochhar)... these are the little threads that stitch our interest.

Pahwa shines as the ordinary father who is struggling to give up smoking. It is a character that is commonly found in our films and has been played by the likes of Pankaj Tripathi and Kumud Mishra before, but Pahwa makes us feel for Mr Naudiyal. Similarly, Anurag Arora is once again convincing as a police officer who brings his social bias to his work, and in a one-scene role, Jackie Shroff shows how a drunkard doesn’t necessarily be useless for society.

Can’t say that for remakes, these days!

Mili is currently running theatres

Published - November 04, 2022 12:07 pm IST

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Mili movie review: Fairly engaging as a survival thriller, but far less impactful, socially insightful than the original

Mili is the Hindi remake of the Malayalam film Helen. It is reasonably suspenseful but too afraid of ruffling feathers to risk clarity in its point about caste.

Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Manoj Pahwa, Sunny Kaushal, Anurag Arora, Rajesh Jais, Hasleen Kaur, Vikram Kochhar, Sanjay Suri, Seema Pahwa, Jackie Shroff

Director: Mathukutty Xavier

Language: Hindi

‘Tis the season for southern Indian films being remade in Hindi by their original directors.

After Pushkar-Gayatri’s Tamil-to-Hindi journey with Vikram Vedha , here comes Mathukutty Xavier’s Mili , a Hindi version of his Malayalam hit, Helen starring Anna Ben. While watching the original in 2019, during one of its most intense scenes, I recall thinking how vastly different the social dynamics would be in north India with the characters present belonging to the exact same communities. The scene involved a young Muslim man caught driving late at night with alcohol on his breath, in the company of his Christian girlfriend, being interrogated at a police station by a narrow-minded officer called Ratheesh who made nasty insinuations about the couple and treated the woman like a child who had to be handed over to her father for her protection. In Kerala, where the story was set, Muslim men in relationships with women of any other community are viewed with suspicion. If this precise scenario were to be transposed to the north of the country, while animosity towards the Muslim man would be a constant but would most likely take on a far more visceral and violent form, an additional prejudice that is prevalent in this part of the country would kick in: the stereotyping of Christian women as being promiscuous and, as conservatives would put it, of “loose morals”. This is a prejudice largely neglected in the liberal public discourse although it was incessantly perpetuated by pre-1990s Hindi films.

Far from exploring the complexities involved in such a situation, Mili pares it down instead. The titular heroine of the Hindi remake is Hindu, not Christian, and the man too has a Hindu name; it is implied that he is from a lower caste, but the script remains fuzzy in that area. Helen was written by Alfred Kurian Joseph, Noble Babu Thomas and Mathukutty Xavier himself. The changes introduced in the Hindi screenplay by Ritesh Shah, this time with producers prominent in the Hindi film industry, place a spotlight on one of the biggest failings of contemporary Hindi cinema: its aversion to examining tricky social and political issues, especially in the mainstream arena.

Mili is the story of Mili Naudiyal, played by Janhvi Kapoor , who lives with her widowered father (Manoj Pahwa) in Dehradun. Mili is a nurse and is planning to migrate to Canada for employment, so that she can lift her family out of their present strained financial circumstances. Towards this end, she is studying for her IELTS exam and works part-time at a fast-food outlet in a mall. She is a strict disciplinarian with her ageing father who dotes on her. Belying her sternness towards him, she is a warm and kind woman, well-liked by those around her.

Mili’s boyfriend Sameer is far less responsible. She keeps pushing him to take up a job, while he prefers to hang out with her if not drinking with his men friends and getting into brawls once in a while.

Life is humming along for Mili, when one day she gets accidentally isolated and confined to an extremely lethal space where she must use every iota of her intelligence and instincts to stay alive.

So much of the experience of Mili depends on whether or not you have seen Helen . If you have, then you know where she gets stuck, what strategies she uses to protect herself and her ultimate fate.

As someone who has watched the original, despite knowing all these details I found that at the level of a survival thriller, Mili is fairly engaging. The tension is palpable when the leading lady disappears and social politics comes into play in the search for her. That said, the dilution of the sensitive equations in the original definitely takes its toll on this one. What further pulls it down are the many minutes needlessly added to the narrative. Mili has also retained the flaws of the original. For one, here too the father is let off too lightly for othering his daughter’s boyfriend. Mili’s over-riding importance in her Dad’s life is stressed to maudlin effect even after the point has been firmly established. His behaviour in the climax is excessively dramatised. And a somewhat silly, gimmicky cameo by Vineeth Sreenivasan in Helen is repeated here as an equally gimmicky, even more awkward and superfluous Jackie Shroff cameo.

The combined effect of all these factors is that Mili is suspenseful, but also unmemorable.

Janhvi possesses an Everywomanness that is useful in this role, and succeeds in portraying Mili’s sweet simplicity. Sunny Kaushal as Sameer has an attractive screen presence. This is an actor to watch out for.

Manoj Pahwa is solid as the heroine’s father, so is Rajesh Jais as his friend. Anurag Arora is good as the policeman from hell, but is put in the shade by memories of Aju Varghese’s chilling performance in Helen .

Irrespective of what the reaction to Mili may be, this question is unavoidable: why is the Hindi film industry so bankrupt in the ideas department that it has turned to remakes of successful southern Indian films in desperation? The appeal of contemporary middle-of-the-road Malayalam cinema in the past decade has been the ability to spot potential films in daily life, the courage routinely displayed by filmmakers, the social and cultural rootedness of their works and the socio-political insights offered. It is a pity that Mathukutty Xavier agreed to direct a watered down Hindi version of his Helen . Mili is hardly rooted in its Uttarakhand location, and is too afraid of ruffling feathers to risk clarity in its point about caste.

Precis : Mili  is reasonably suspenseful but that is about all it is. 

Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars)

Mili is in theatres

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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