With Love

The Art of Looking Backwards

There’s a particular ache in the way people circle back to their own past. It almost never arrives neatly; it feels more like digging through a shoebox of old Polaroids with the colors already starting to run together. In *With Love*, director Madhan seems to understand that tenderness almost instinctively. The film opens with familiar romantic-comedy machinery—an arranged blind date, a reluctant lead, the awkward choreography of meeting in a coffee shop—but he doesn’t stay there long. He’s not really chasing the usual "will they, won't they". What interests him is the older, messier question: "did we, didn't we"?



Sathya, played by Abishan Jeevinth with a kind of guarded stillness, feels like someone who lives just outside the center of every room. He doesn’t quite look at people so much as hover near them. Jeevinth catches that agonizing paralysis of an introvert who has decided anonymity is safer than exposure. Then Monisha arrives—Anaswara Rajan plays her with a bright, disarming unpredictability—and the film quietly changes shape. What looked like a comedy of manners turns into something more intimate: an excavation of shared memory.

What stayed with me most was the way Madhan films their conversations. He resists the obvious close-up when the big emotional details emerge. Instead, the camera hangs back a little, watching their hands, their posture, the nervous business with straws and watches and all the little things people do when they’re trying not to say too much. It’s a truthful way to shoot dialogue. As *The Hindu* noted in their coverage, the film works because it treats "nostalgia not as a sedative, but as a catalyst for growth." This isn’t only about two people falling in love. It’s about two people realizing they may be the last witnesses to versions of themselves that have otherwise disappeared.



There’s a stretch in the middle—the "reminiscence sequence"—that feels likely to become the scene people remember most. They’re on a park bench, talking about a teacher they both knew, then drifting into some minor shared humiliation from a school assembly. Rajan is remarkable here. She’s telling a silly little story, but you can see something bigger land in her face: the realization that somebody else actually *saw* her during years when she felt invisible. Her laugh catches for a beat before she covers it with a joke. It’s beautifully small work. She isn’t selling the memory to us; she’s being caught off guard by it.

The film does stumble now and then. At times the pacing drifts so deliberately that it borders on overindulgent, too enamored with its own pauses. There were moments when I wanted these two to stop rummaging through old feeling and simply *act*, to make a mistake rooted in the present instead of another one filtered through memory. Is that a weakness? Maybe. Or maybe that slowness is part of what the film is after. We’re so trained by modern streaming rhythms to expect constant movement that a movie willing to sit in stillness can briefly seem like it has stopped working.



What lingers after the credits isn’t really the romantic resolution. That almost feels beside the point, a modest nod to structure. What stays is the sensation of recognition. *With Love* suggests that falling for someone can be as simple, and as strange, as opening your shoebox of Polaroids and discovering they’ve been carrying the same one around all this time, maybe with some of the very same pictures inside. It’s a quiet film, gentle and unforced, with no need to raise its voice. It just stays there with you, the way an old friend does after years apart. In the current landscape of cinema, that kind of softness is more than enough.