‘Tu Yaa Main’ review: Lots of teeth and bite too

She’s from that social strata where homes have swimming pools. He’s from that rung on the ladder where water is supplied by tankers. The only logical meeting ground for Avani (Shanaya Kapoor) and Maruti (Adarsh Gourav) is social media. Avani is a successful content creator; Maruti isn’t yet but wants to be.

A proposed professional collaboration turns into an unlikely romantic one. Their ardour is put to the ultimate test when the socially mismatched couple, taking shelter from pelting rain, find themselves in an abandoned hotel with a 20-foot-deep swimming pool.

There is chatter in the locality that crocodiles have entered human habitation. Who is to know that the creature is in the very swimming pool whose water has been drained with the couple inside it?

Every relationship demands strong survival instincts – this dictum prevails in Bejoy Nambiar’s Tu Yaa Main, which remains a love story even after sliding into horror territory. Trapped with the increasingly hangry reptile, and with no escape seemingly in sight, Avani and Maruti must summon every ounce of their courage while also learning to trust each other.

Himanshu Sharma’s story, with a screenplay by Abhishek Bandekar, is adapted from Ping Lumpraploeng’s Thai hit The Pool (2018). The ordeal in the Thai film lasts 90 minutes. Tu Yaa Main lumbers on for 145 minutes. The padding is provided by an awareness of the class divide in India and overly ample foregrounding before Avani and Maruti are literally thrown into the deep end.

Maruti wears a ring formed from the word “Flow”; Avani has a previous relationship with water. The unending rain, the elements that bubble up to the surface during floods, the replacement of natural landscapes with concrete structures – all of these flesh out – as well as bloat – a mostly satisfying and grimly entertaining thriller.

Bejoy Nambiar’s attention-deficit filmmaking and tendency for flashiness over substance are both in check this time. Working with pre-existing material that has been smartly localised, Nambiar delivers his most watchable film in years. The excellent production values and Remy Dalai’s nifty cinematography boost the plot’s credibility.

Apart from the stark differences between the couple’s worlds, the swimming pool set is frighteningly convincing, as are the animatronic crocodiles. There’s also a nice, very Indian detail of a ladder that could have saved the couple but is padlocked, as these things tend to be.

There are cameos for Parvathy Thiruvothu, Amruta Khanvilkar and Shrikant Yadav. The movie has at least one completely avoidable death, a waterproof cellphone and moments that could have been chopped with the same precision with which the crocodile attacks its targets. The couple’s ordeal is needlessly stretched to the point where the movie risks losing the empathy that has built up for them.

Fortunately, Avani and Maruti are well-etched characters, with believable reactions to their plight. Adarsh Gourav and Shanaya Kapoor are in superb sync – Gourav compelling as the working-class rapper who comes to regret the day he falls for Avani; Kapoor perfectly cast as the wealthy Avani who similarly wonders whether she has done the right thing. The actors also have the requisite chemistry needed to sustain what turns out to be a two-hander for the most part (excluding the reptile).

The swimming pool is where Avani and Maruti thrash out their differences. Nambiar’s ear for music results in some cool tunes and clever repurposing of older film songs, especially the breathy Tum Hi Hamari Ho Manzil My Love from Yaara Dildara (1991) – also a rich-poor romance, where the man’s mother and a gangster who fancies the woman stand in for the crocodile.

In Tu Yaa Main too, the crocodile is a very real threat as well as a monstrous metaphor, forcing Avani and Maruti into a Titanic-style fight to the finish. A peculiar love triangle of sorts ensues between man, woman and beast, each circling one another without any idea how it will end.

Also read:

‘Tu Yaa Main’ and a short history of the crocodile in cinema