The Girish A.D. way

Malayalam cinema has always liked the ordinary man. A medical representative. A son trying to hold a joint family together. A Gulf-returned man with big plans. An earnest schoolteacher. A car mechanic. These characters have recurred for three decades, played by a rotating cast of dependable faces. The director Priyadarshan, known for his slapstick comedies of the 1980s and 90s, gave them comic props. The director duo Siddique-Lal turned their troubles into humour. The screenwriter and director A.K. Lohithadas, known for his realist, character-driven dramas, mixed in sorrow. The director Rajasenan added mischief. The director Sathyan Anthikkad, working with the writer and actor Sreenivasan, turned everyday failure and insecurity into self-aware comedy. But the type held across all these versions: a decent man tested by circumstance, who wins by staying decent.Girish A.D., directing since 2019, works differently. The ordinariness stays in his films, but his heroes are not being tested for goodness. Nothing insists on redeeming qualities. They are not trying to prove anything to anyone. They are simply going about the ordinary business of growing up, sitting around, working regular jobs, and falling in love. This Onam season offered the clearest proof of how far that approach has carried the director. Up against the actor Prithviraj Sukumaran’s gangster saga Khalifa and the Kannada star Yash’s pan-Indian spectacle Toxic, Girish’s small, unglamorous romance Bethlehem Kudumba Unit did win outright, outselling two of the biggest names in South Indian cinema.Across eight years and five feature films, Girish has built one of the most consistent track records in the industry, without leaning on a star or a twist. Thanneer Mathan Dinangal (2019), made on a reported budget of Rs.2 crore with an all-new cast, earned roughly Rs.50 crore. Super Sharanya (2022), built around young actors with no bankable names, was a hit. Premalu (2024), made on a reported budget of Rs.3 crore, became one of the year’s biggest successes and crossed into the Tamil and Telugu markets. Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, released last month, has already crossed Rs.250 crore worldwide, with releases in other languages still to come.No superstar carried any of these films; there were no sequel hooks or cameos for marketing. The film earned audience trust through writing that puts lovable people in everyday lives, speaking the way we actually speak—the same throwaway Malayalam and Tamil movie references that have become part of how we talk to each other.Also Read | Malayalam cinema’s renaissance? More than the fabled trioHow does a director build this kind of repeat viewing and cross-demographic loyalty without the tools that usually guarantee box-office certainty? The short answer is that Girish has a very specific idea of what his central characters are to be.Making newcomers feel like old friendsGirish’s 2017 short film Vishuddha Ambrossey, which won Best Director at the Adoor Short Film Festival, now looks like a curtain-raiser for arguably the finest school drama Malayalam cinema has produced—Thanneer Mathan Dinangal. He filled that short space almost entirely with newcomers, and let the ordinariness of their faces and emotions do the work. Malayalam cinema has had other newcomer-driven hits, but few contemporary directors have turned as many first-timers into established names as Girish has: the actor Mathew Thomas, fresh off the acclaimed Kumbalangi Nights at the time, along with Mamitha Baiju, Naslen, and Anaswara Rajan.In his second film, Super Sharanya, with Anaswara Rajan in the title role and Mamitha Baiju as her closest friend, Girish avoided the usual sophomore slump by attempting a genre uncommon in Malayalam cinema: a story told from a young woman’s point of view, built around her friendships, anxieties, and romantic confusion. Malayalam’s last real attempt at the same age and tone was the director Roshan Andrews’s Notebook (2006), which handled grief and loss with unusual candour for the genre. Super Sharanya is lighter than that. Anaswara, Naslen, and Mamitha have all gone on to bigger things since.What the casting reveals is that Girish’s writing has nowhere to hide behind a familiar face, and nothing to lean on except itself. That is probably why Super Sharanya, Thanneer Mathan Dinangal, and Premalu hold up on a second or third watch. You are not there for the plot. You are there to spend time with people who start to feel like friends you actually know.Look across all five Girish films, and there is rarely a character who wants to hurt anyone in an evil, toxic way. Ravi Padmanabhan, the teacher-antagonist of Thanneer Mathan Dinangal, played by the actor and director Vineeth Sreenivasan, is insufferable and a fraud, not evil. The Ajith Menon figure in Super Sharanya—a direct spoof of the brooding, possessive hero of the Telugu film Arjun Reddy—is an idiot, not a threat. Aadhi in Premalu, until the final act, is self-absorbed, not cruel. The film trusts its audience to see the emptiness underneath the loudness of these people. Even I Am Kathalan (2024), built around a simple cybercrime plot, has no villain defined by menace or harm.

Girish A.D. has built a rare Malayalam cinema success story by putting ordinary young people, everyday friendships and unremarkable lives at the centre of his films. | Photo Credit: @Girish AD/Facebook Girish’s conflicts come from timing and the small social frictions between people trying to look good in front of each other. It is a return to the older, familial Malayalam film, where the villain, if a film even needed one, was rarely more than a flawed neighbour or an unreasonable relative—the kind of small-time troublemaker the writer Sreenivasan wrote so well in Sanmanassullavarkku Samadhanam (1986) or Mukunthetta Sumitra Vilikkunnu (1988). There is no moralising.Loving without keeping scoreGirish’s heroes do not measure themselves. And that is a rare feat in Indian cinema these days. Ours is a generation whose romantic anxieties are largely structured around comparison—with the algorithmic, curated version of everyone else’s life on a screen. Malayalam cinema has an older version of the same anxiety, where family approval and the idea of a more suitable match made the hero compete, or pretend to be someone he was not, as in Akkare Ninnoru Maran (1985) and Mazhavilkavadi (1989).Girish’s heroes are free of this burden. They do not turn the comparison inward. Take Jaison in Thanneer Mathan Dinangal; he is irritated by Ravi, the teacher, but the irritation is about the show-off coming from the man, it is not a sense of inferiority. Sachin in Premalu has not figured out his career and is freshly rejected when the film opens, yet nothing in his pursuit of Reenu is staged—he likes her, so he stays close to her. Vishnu in I Am Kathalan carries the same unbothered quality in love, and is the only Girish hero who sets out to prove a point; even then, he does it without much noise, with whatever little he has. Justin in Bethlehem Kudumba Unit is candid about the age gap between him and Ashley. His awareness produces shyness, inhibition, and restraint, never self-disqualification.Girish’s protagonists also do not force their way through the obstacle between them and the person they love. They wait it out, anxiously but patiently. In Thanneer Mathan Dinangal, what actually resolves the teenage crush, which is left mostly offscreen, is simply time and Keerthy’s promise that she will not forget Jaison. In Premalu, Sachin never engineers a moment to force Reenu’s hand; the film just follows him existing until circumstance and her own clarity settle things. In Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, Justin and Ashley’s separation ends through no grand gesture at all; it happens when circumstance puts them back in the same space, and they are forced to confront feelings they had each tried and failed to leave behind.

A still from Thanneer Mathan Dinangal. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement Girish’s heroes stay in their own social and emotional lane. They do not reach upward, display a confidence they do not have, or borrow the swagger of the Aadhis and Ravi Padmanabhans around them. Their love is proportionate to who they already are.Decisive women dealing with passivityIndian cinema has spent years building projects around machine guns, machismo, and might—films with little substance but impressive numbers. Against that background, a Girish hero is genuinely refreshing. But across five films, it is worth asking why he expects so little, so late, from his men.The patience of his heroes, scared of doing anything decisive, has a price. They go silent exactly when there is a real chance of disappointment, and what gets the romance moving again is the heroine. This is where even Girish’s admirers start to wonder why his female protagonists indulge these heroes at all, and what exactly the man is being loved for. Maybe it is simply that they are gentle, funny, and honest about their confusion. But nothing in a Girish film makes them answer for that confusion, and the story never asks them to grow out of it.Sharanya, Reenu, and Ashley are all sharp, decisive women, and each has been the one tackling the hero’s passivity. It would be easy to call that inscrutable. It is more honest to say the men simply did not do much. Girish hands these men the hero’s chair. Real growth, by his own idea of what a central character is allowed to be, would mean the next hero stepping up before the heroine has to ask. Ordinariness—or passivity mistaken for ordinariness—is not enough on its own.Jokes that do not try too hardThat said, there is an uncomfortable truth about today’s Malayalam cinema, which interestingly gets exposed while Gireesh’a films are discussed, like a collateral analysis. For all the industry’s current success, the quality of writing in Malayalam cinema has slipped from where it once was. The cinema built its reputation, in large part, on writers who treated dialogue as character: the novelist and screenwriter M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the filmmaker P. Padmarajan, Lohithadas, Sreenivasan, the screenwriter John Paul, Raghunath Paleri, etc, whose scripts show that dialogue can sound completely natural without being lazy filler. Much of what gets made now, across theatrical releases and the flood of OTT content especially, has settled for a compromised naturalism—conversations that sound forced or directionless, padded with filler words.Girish’s films, whoever he has co-written them with, have never made this mistake. The banter is well written and well timed (in interviews, he maintains that every little detail and nuance is scripted). A Girish plot can sound like nothing at all, and the pleasure lies in specifics: the exact beat of a friend group’s banter, the embarrassment of a lost cricket match, Sachin’s flat and uninspiring proposal to Reenu in Premalu, and more. In these films, warmth becomes an atmosphere.Also Read | Adoor and the unbearable accumulation of timeEvery Girish film also carries jokes built on pop-culture references. His placement of a quick reference plays like an inside joke between the film and an audience it trusts to already get it. Matha Jet, the bus that first shows up in Thanneer Mathan Dinangal, turns up again in Bethlehem Kudumba Unit. It means nothing to the plot. It is just that everyday lives are built around ordinary things, and Girish remembers to write them in. That is why seeing a bus on screen can feel as lovely as hearing a name like Thekkummoottil Insurance Corporation (Akkara Kazhchakal (2008-2010)), Urvashi Theatres (Ramji Rao Speaking (1989) and Mannar Mathai Speaking (1995)), Dakshayani Biscuits (Mithunam (1993)), or K&K Automobiles (Aram + Aram = Kinnaram (1985))Premalu and Bethlehem Kudumba Unit are produced by Bhavana Studios, backed by the actor Fahadh Faasil, the director Dileesh Pothan, and the writer Syam Pushkaran—the trio whose own films, Maheshinte Prathikaram, Kumbalangi Nights, and Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, drove Malayalam cinema’s recent realist wave. Girish is a natural commercial extension of that wave into unabashedly mainstream, feel-good territory.Malayalam cinema’s commercial hierarchy has historically revolved around a small number of stars. With Lokah, Manjummel Boys, and Vazha II all setting box-office records without a traditional star at the centre, that hierarchy does not hold the way it used to. But even in this changed landscape, Girish’s name means something different. He has made a habit of putting unremarkable people at the centre of the frame, and making room for them at the box office too. Whether he can continue doing that as his own name becomes a draw will be the more interesting challenge. His films have worked because their characters seem to exist without knowing they are characters worth watching. Success has a way of changing that equation.Vineeth Menon is an analytics professional based in Bangalore. He likes to think of himself as an eternal student of mainstream cinema.