Merry Christmas review: Katrina Kaif & Vijay Sethupathi light up this measured thriller

Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi in Sriram Raghavan's Merry Christmas, set in 1990s Mumbai. (Photo via X)

“Do fish remember?” Maria, played by Katrina Kaif, asks a stranger in a scene from Sriram Raghavan’s Merry Christmas. It’s Christmas eve and two strangers who have only recently met find themselves in an enclosed space. The place is decked up with lights, the trees decorated, the drinks lavishly laid out. Everything oozes a kind of gaudy perkiness and perfection. Which also means, nothing is quite as it seems. Merry Christmas has the temperament, the musical foundation and the visual language of a thriller. We are never told to not anticipate the unexpected. But unlike Raghavan’s barnstorming Andhadun, Merry Christmas plays out like a parable about love and sacrifice. It’s not quite as thrilling, or wicked as his last film and takes an awful lot of time setting itself up for some sort of narrative denouement. When it clicks into gear, though, it becomes much more than a functional thriller.

Also read: Sriram Raghavan: Katrina Kaif's Hindi, Vijay Sethupathi's Hindi didn't bother me

It’s Christmas eve and the setting is '90s Bombay. Albert, played by the typically understated Vijay Sethupathi, has only just wandered back into town. He has been in self-imposed exile, licking the wounds that heartbreak has left him with. Instead of staying in and by himself, Albert chooses to step out and take in a bit of Bombay (now Mumbai). At a restaurant he runs into Maria, a nervy woman accompanied by her daughter and her giant teddy bear. Curiosity turns to connection as the two speak, share and reminisce. Set within the catholic community of Bombay, the film does a remarkable job recreating the city as an enthralled capsule of nostalgia. A dress Maria chooses to wear is compared to a time machine that would take her back to a time when she felt freer and unburdened.

Both protagonists are visibly carrying a great deal of pain. Pain that they have chosen to deal with in eerily similar ways. This knowledge or converging point of empathy, the film arrives through decidedly wicked means. A death clicks the narrative into rapid, whirly motion as its skin of a harmless rom-com finally gives way to the chaos of the skinless thriller it has threatened to become from the start. The first half is a casual stroll through paraphernalia, objects and incidents that promise to accrue interest and meaning at a later point. Like any Raghavan film, there is a great deal of foreshadowing the obvious, enough fixations to suggest they will play a key role in stringing the story together; there are origami swans, a bell, a pair of fish, a lost wallet and so on. It’s dense, meticulously curated and predictably tantalising.

Unlike Andhadhun, though, Raghavan’s direction here picks flavour instead of ferocity. The camera moves with the kindness of familiarity, suggesting this is much more than a clunking together of two hollow, alien glasses. These aren’t lives encroaching upon each other but littered fragments looking for a larger whole. The mystery itself seems unfocussed in favour of uncovering its protagonists with caution and care. There isn’t this restless energy to make sense of things either. Instead we get stolid, somewhat comically poised people who seem to know a thing or two about loss, grief and maybe even revenge. “Sometimes violence is better than sacrifice. Sometimes,” Albert tells Maria at one point. The stodgy pace, the uncanny calmness deprives the first half of momentum, a flaw that though frustrating, ultimately delivers in unexpected ways by the end.

Raghavan’s world-building, his love for cinema and the city of his work is obvious to see. It’s also a misshapen hole at the heart of a film that could have maybe packed less to find that speedy, shaky tenor of a thriller which refuses to let go, once it has pulled you to the edge of your seat. The argument in favour of dialling back that edginess and tempo is the fundamental softness of love that Merry Christmas is ultimately driven by. The great revelation, that maybe it only takes love to become the compass for poor judgement. That it can strike you, cripple you, misguide you and transform you when you least expect it.

One of the larger pleasures of Merry Christmas is to see Katrina Kaif finally being urged to emerge from behind the waxy glint of the diva she is known to be, to become the unreliable but sufficiently charming Maria. Sethupathi is prodigiously nerveless and disaffected for the most part, and serves as the ideal furrow for a story of its sombre, melancholic backdrop to plant itself in. There are some likeable cameos from Sanjay Kapoor and Vinay Pathak as well, but the film belongs to Kaif and Sethupathi, unlikely agents of love and menace on a night of not knowing. They sing, dance, shed tears, candidly unfurling towards a tragedy of sorts. It’s not as exhilarating to behold as it is maybe riveting to appraise as a rewarding yet curious piece of ‘rom-con’.