Merry Christmas Review: Vijay Sethupathi’s contrast really aids Katrina Kaif, who portrays bewilderment and weakness veiled in sporadic bursts of steely determination.
Merry Christmas, a quiet brainteaser that never loses its hold on viewers, is directed by Sriram Raghavan, Bollywood’s undeniable master of pitch-black thrillers. Raghavan steps back from the racy narrative rhythm of Andhadhun and treads carefully between the unhurried and the urgent, the philosophical and the provocative, and the classy and the kicky.
The French story’s title literally translates as “dumbwaiter.” The novel was published in English under the title Bird in a Cage. A freight elevator and an imprisoned bird are pertinent comparisons in the context of Merry Christmas, which is set in the Christian neighborhood of Bombay in the 1980s.
Merry Christmas literally shows how things and lives move up and down, but the film itself is incredibly well-balanced; rarely is language so completely hypnotic. The film’s controlled momentum, including its occasional lack of pace, is a key component of its design; every cut, every camera angle, and every bit of blocking heightens suspense and anxiety without giving away too much about what is to be expected around the corner.
The movie begins with a split screen that shows two mixer-grinders: one turns lentils and chillies into maligai podi, while the other turns tablets into powder. Both of them hide dark secrets, which, when exposed, show two sides of obsessive love gone wrong. Is not life, after all, just a grind? What one makes of it depends, as it does for the two main characters in the movie, on what taste it leaves behind.
Rich in artistic, visual, and musical touches that greatly heighten the mystery surrounding a Christmas Eve “romance” between a mysterious loner who returns to his Mumbai house after a protracted absence and the sad married mother of a little, wide-eyed daughter, Pari Maheshwari Sharma.
Merry Christmas is as Rohmerian in its long and piercingly unsentimental moral probe into the mechanics of love, loyalty, and betrayal as it is Hitchcockian in its unnerving twists and turns.
The audience has so much to savor and unpack in this film that it never feels pretentious or overly deliberate—even when there is just talk happening on screen, or stray glances being exchanged between two strangers, or just awkward silences being resorted to in trying to penetrate the distance that exists between Maria (Katrina Kaif) and Albert (Vijay Sethupathi).
Director of Photography Madhu Neelakandan envelopes the residential interiors and the cityscapes with a hint of magic, as everything in and around the frames that he composes suggests both festivity and enigma. Merry Christmas to the two main characters as well as the attentive watcher, who is given a ringside view of the goings-on without everything being spelled out in black and white.
In one of the most convincing on-screen roles of her career, Katrina Kaif portrays a mix of confusion and vulnerability with intermittent bursts of steely determination in a strikingly minimalistic manner; she is greatly assisted by Vijay Sethupathi’s contrast as an actor who depends more on his eyes and facial expressions than on words to convey the storm raging around him and in his heart.
Merry Christmas is an incredibly creative cinematic journey that uses a soundscape reminiscent of Hindi cinema from the 1980s and an evocative and evocative color palette to create a sense of confusion as the ghost of loneliness and the consequences of lost love haunt the characters. Maria and Albert each have backstories that have led them to this point in the movie, and they journey together over the course of the two and a half hours of the film in search of some sort of redemption.
The script poses questions to the audience, while Maria and Albert ask each other: Is self-inflicted injury morally more acceptable than seeking closure at the expense of someone who has hurt you? Can a brief encounter result in a life-changing secret covenant between two people whose paths never cross until one fine evening?
As they enjoy a drink together in Maria’s house and then go for a stroll, the two main characters radiate a combination of calmness and mischievousness. They exchange brief information with each other in an attempt to help each other break the ice and provide some clarity to the audience, though this effect is selective and is intended to function as a kind of obfuscation combined with revelation.
Merry Christmas keeps the attention firmly on Kaif and Sethupathi, but it also makes sure that none of the supporting cast members ever feel unimportant, no matter how little time they spend on screen. It is amazing that an actor who plays a character with one barely audible line is more than just a supporting character—rather, he represents the most important turning point in the movie.
Merry Christmas is all you would expect a thriller to be: captivating, thought-provoking, compelling, and subtly challenging. It bewitches even as it confounds.
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