Vowels

Vowels Movie Synopsis: Five short films, each themed around a vowel, explore different shades of love and obsession.

Vowels Movie Review: Everything that can be said about love has been said, filmed, sung, and remixed into a Spotify playlist. Vowels says it all again anyway, five times over, across two and a half hours, with many songs and the conviction that mood lighting is a substitute for a screenplay.

The segments each tackle a shade of love mapped to a vowel: attraction, emotion, intimacy, obsession, unconditional. In Sangeeth Nath's opener, a fashion photographer strangles a woman during a shoot and stickers her body with a film director's name as credit, as though slapping a cinephile label on a killing makes it commentary. Jagan Rajendran's segment has a man knock his ex off a bike in an accident and sit through a flashback breakup that plays out exactly as you'd guess. Santhosh Ravi's chapter pairs a wheelchair-bound cancer patient (Samyuktha Viswanathan) with a nature photographer who once spotted her on a beach and couldn't let go. Sweet in theory, but the segment stretches its single idea thin and coasts on sentimentality. Hemanth Kumar's closer stacks dream on top of dream on top of dream until nobody, the characters or the audience, has any idea what's real or why it matters.

Only Dhilip Kumar's segment finds a pulse. Yugi Sethu plays a chatty stranger who intercepts a man about to jump off a building and talks him down with a love story involving Chinni Jayanth as a bachelor professor reuniting with a lost love decades later. It works because the comedic framing gives it an energy the rest of the film is starved of. One segment out of five clearing the bar is not a passing grade.

The deeper issue is that five directors sharing one music director and one editor produces a film that sounds and feels the same throughout. Song montages pad every segment, stretched out as though lingering on a moment long enough will give it meaning. When every segment drowns its story in the same haze of music and slow motion, the anthology format stops being a showcase and starts feeling like a trap.

Written By: Abhinav Subramanian