Home Review - A sweet film whose heart & sweetness outshines everything else!

PUBLISHED DATE : 19/Aug/2021

Home Review - A sweet film whose heart & sweetness outshines everything else!

Home Review - A sweet film whose heart and sweetness outshines everything else!
Bharath Vijayakumar
The simplest way to define Home would be to call it a feel good drama. But this is also a coming of age story in many ways. And it is not one that involves an adolescent transitioning into an adult. It is about a family or more specifically one of its younger ones understanding what it means to be 'at home'. But the most intriguing and heartwarming part of Home is, how someone in his sixties, reinvents himself in this era, where technology drives everything. Well, this is also a film where an elder person learns technology while a younger one has to unlearn his addiction to technology!

Oliver Twist (Indrans) and Kuttiyama (Manju Pillai) live with their younger son Charles (Naslen) and Oliver Twist's father. Their elder son Antony (Sreenath Bhasi) lives alone because of his work. The film captures the dynamics of this family when Antony comes home for a week's stay.
 
Oliver Twist is the protagonist of the film in many ways and Indran has you behind the character right from the first frame. It doesn't even feel like he is performing for a camera. In all those scenes where he yearns for his son's attention and tries to get close to him, you really feel like you are Oliver Twist. The insecurity, the inferiority complex, the love - Indran superbly internalizes these emotions and leaves us with moist eyes in many instances. Watch out for the scene where he silently walks away to avoid being caught with tears. There are instances where the scene itself might be a bit melodramatic but the actor is never.

Home is a lengthy film and runs for about 2 hours and 40 minutes. I did not mind it though, as it has been a while since we had such an instantly likable film. The conflicts are few and far in between but the film and the actors keep us invested. The main conflict in the film is the strained relationship between Antony and his father. You wonder why Anthony is so rude to his father. There are scenes where you can relate to Antony's anger or frustration arising out of his father's actions. But there are few scenes where his behaviour comes across as forced.
 
Home is a film that has its share of imperfections. But it is a film that feels 'home'. As Anthony says at one point, "I can be imperfect at home". The film in fact tries to rubbish this concept of 'perfect'. The characters in the film keep searching for happiness and success by trying to be 'perfect'. And they end up finding happiness once they embrace themselves and others as they are. The film has a 'fairly tale' like portion that happens in the life of an ordinary person. But I really think that the point it wanted to convey was, that the life of someone, who is supposedly 'ordinary', isn't anything less than a fairy tale.

Bottomline
The sweetness might be a little overdone but given the recent drought of such films, Home turns out to be one pleasant experience.

Rating: 3.25/5

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