29 Movie Review By Baradwaj Rangan | Vidhu | Preethi Asrani | Sean Roldan | Rathna Kumar

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to Galatta Plus. In this video review episode, we're going to be talking about Ratna Kumar's 29.

[00:00:06]The film is a fresh, heartfelt, sincere story about life and love, but it's a little too poetic for its own good. Vidu and Preeti Asrani play the central couple, but her goals clash with his.

[00:00:18]Can love coexist with the harsh realities of life? For that matter, does love need to be redefined? These are all great ideas and there are many lovely moments in this movie, but the narrative is not consistently convincing. The result is an okayish romance. That's the quick review. A longer analysis follows and it may contain spoilers.

[00:00:51]>> [music] >> There is a beautiful Tamil phrase that we hear in 29, which is written and directed by Ratna Kumar. This phrase is Adaiyala Nerukadi or identity crisis and it is uttered by the mind voice of the male protagonist. His name is Satya and he's played by Vidu. As the film's title suggests, Satya is in the last year of his 20s and before he steps into his 30s, he wants an identity that goes beyond his nationality, caste, gender or even his occupation in a generic accounts department of a generic company. None of these are choices that he made. Satya wanted to be an engineer, but his eco-activist mother made him study agriculture. If Satya had had a choice, maybe he could have been a poet.

[00:01:42]A large part of 29 is narrated in Satya's voiceover {slash} mind voice and broken up into chapters with titles like Nee Naan Marai Kudai and Anna Salai Theru Endha Kirukkalgal. When Satya sees a girl with flowers in her hair, for instance, he sees the strand of jasmine as a delicate paperweight that keeps her hair from flying in the wind. This girl is Vijji, and she's played by Preity Asrani. And like poets often do, Satya makes her the muse for his mind wash.

[00:02:13]She becomes the reason for his living.

[00:02:15]She becomes the solution to his identity crisis.

[00:02:19]Satya's identity becomes the fact that he is now Vijji's lover. Even his proposal to her has a touch Satya is a whole head taller than Vijji, and he asks her, "I smoke and I back a video." But Vijji is not a poet. She knows what her identity is, or at least what she wants it to be. She wants to become an IAS officer, and that becomes the conflict point. The boy thinks that love is enough, but the girl says that the boy needs to have a goal. That loving her cannot be a goal in itself.

[00:02:49]After meeting Vijji, Satya's happy in the present, in the moment, but Vijji keeps looking at the future. Not just their future together as a couple, but also her future as an IAS officer.

[00:03:01]Rathna Kumar, as always, has ended up making a very interesting film conceptually, and something that's very different from his other films. The driving force of 29 is Vijji's perceived inconsistency. She wants to be with Satya, but she also knows that she cannot spend all her time with him. She needs to prepare for her exams. She keeps succumbing to his charms, and then she keeps pulling back. This leaves Satya confused and frustrated. And we slowly begin to see that 29 is not just about Satya's identity crisis, but also about the identity crisis of this emotion that we call love.

[00:03:35]In biology, the heart is an oddly shaped organ with four chambers and blood vessels and whatnot. But for people in love, the heart is the perfectly symmetrical red symbol we know from playing cards and WhatsApp emojis. Is life just about the chemistry of love, or is it also about the mathematics of the money needed to lead a life together? This observation comes from Satya's friend, superbly played by Avinash. As a filmmaker who has failed in love, he becomes the film's probing conscience. Or maybe I should say that he could have become the film's probing conscience. 29 floats along prettily, helped greatly by Madhesh Manickam's pretty cinematography, but the story is a bunch of pretty ideas that struggle to find focus. There are many odd bits that don't quite fit in, like the scene where Vijji announces to the world that she loves Satya, or the out of character dance that Vijji performs, or the strange set of events that result in Satya and Vijji being alone in a room, or Satya's conversion to an eco-activist like his mother, or the one-note villain who emerges late in the film. A lot of this registers only at a surface level, and we want to know more. At some point I began to wish that the film had been just a look at how we glorify love to the extent that it becomes everything when it's just one of the many aspects of life. There is also lust, for instance. The first time Satya runs into Vijji, there's a hint of sex in the situation. As with love, and unlike Satya, Preeti has a very matter-of-fact view about sex, but the way this angle is developed is not very convincing.

[00:05:06]Vidhu and Preeti are standing up both individually okay, but together as a couple, something doesn't click. As a screenplay, when read on paper, or maybe on a computer screen, 29 must have been wonderful. The poetry in the lines must have been wonderful. But when we hear them said out loud, it sounds labored.

[00:05:23]One of the big strengths of the film is the music by Shawn Roldan. And when sung, the poetry, lines like Neeparikka Pogum Poovai Maara Mullum Kooda Thavikkudhu, these lines sound beautiful. But when spoken, the poetic dialogues don't land well because the line readings are too earnest, and they have odd moments of emphasis on certain syllables. They don't flow organically, and I felt that this film could have used more of the casualness that characterized this director's Mayada Mann. 29 remains a watchable film and it has lovely scenes like the one where Viji wears a particular sari when she sits for her IAS exams but in the midst of all the pretty poetry some muscular prose would have greatly helped us to embrace the points being made about life and love. That's it about 29. If you like this video review do subscribe to Galatta Plus and see you soon at the movies.

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