What keeps Mollywood's Balan: The Boy from becoming a perfect film

Balan: The Boy has drawn acclaim for its performances, atmosphere and precise observations. The debate now is why its unresolved motivations and thinner supporting arcs keep it from greatness.

In Short

• Strong performances and craft elevate Balan: The Boy
• Thin character writing weakens key emotional moments
• A near-great film that falls short of its potential

The recent Malayalam film Balan: The Boy has inspired the kind of response filmmakers dream about. Strong reviews, passionate discussions and audiences dissecting every detail long after leaving theatres. Yet beneath all the praise sits a quieter conversation. Not about whether the film is good. Most people agree that it is. The debate is about why a film so rich in ideas, performances and atmosphere stops just short of becoming something truly unforgettable.

The image that stayed with me after Balan: The Boy ended was not from its climax. It is a mother and son lying side by side, a gun occupying the space where another person should be. No dialogue needed. The shot says everything about who these two are and what surviving together has cost them. For much of its running time, the film is full of observations this precise. A child who learns to lie before he learns to belong. A woman who changes names, religions and cities with the ease of somebody changing clothes.

Chidambaram's film is not a failure. That is almost the problem. A failure you can set aside. Balan: The Boy is the far more aggravating kind, a film that gets so much genuinely right that every avoidable mistake cuts twice as deep. By the time the credits roll, the mother and son have lived under so many identities that their names hardly matter.

For this piece, and in keeping with the spirit of the film itself, the mother will be called Mary and her son will be called Luca. They have answered so many names in the film that two more seem only appropriate. Everything that follows contains spoilers.

A mystery that becomes bigger than its answer

For most of the first half, Balan: The Boy runs on a single question: Why is Mary running? Everything grows from that mystery. Every new identity, every abandoned home, every fabricated backstory, every lesson she teaches Luca about survival. Chidambaram allows the mystery to deepen with every town and every fresh beginning that turns out not to be one. For a long time, it works beautifully.

The problem is not that the film withholds answers. The problem is that the explanations it eventually offers never feel as powerful as the mystery itself, and to arrive at even those partial explanations, a viewer has to do considerable work that the screenplay should have done for them.

The screenplay hints at exploitation, coercion and a dangerous past that did not end when the prison sentence did. Shamna, Mary’s jail mate, hovers over the narrative like a ghost that refuses to leave. Certain lines suggest a darker history involving powerful men and a system designed to trap women long after they believe they have escaped.

It is exactly the kind of backstory that, properly developed, would make every one of Mary's choices feel not just understandable but inevitable. Yet the film never commits to it. Is Mary running from a real and present threat? From trauma that has calcified into compulsion? From something closer to paranoia? The film raises all three questions and endorses none, and that uncertainty quietly hollows out the emotional centre of the story.

Buried within this is an even more interesting idea that the film only half pursues. The longer Mary survives through reinvention, the more survival itself becomes her identity. Every time warmth enters their lives, a tea shop owner, a kind neighbour, a moment of genuine connection, Mary leaves.

The film flirts with the possibility that she is not only running from something external but from belonging itself, from the terrifying vulnerability of being known. That is arguably the most compelling psychological idea in the entire film. But a compelling idea is only as good as the commitment behind it.

Chidambaram gestures at this reading without ever fully inhabiting it. The direction never builds the scenes or the silences that would make this interpretation feel definitive rather than incidental. And then the second half arrives, increasingly preoccupied with plot mechanics, and the idea is quietly abandoned before it ever had the chance to become the film's emotional core.

The characters who deserved more

The film takes its own sweet time establishing Mary and Luca, but extends far less patience to the supporting characters, particularly in the second half. Abbas, played by Tovino Thomas, is the clearest example of a character the screenplay needed to develop and did not. His relationship with Luca is the emotional hinge on which the film's resolution turns, yet the screenplay never builds that relationship with enough texture.

The scenes exist, but the feeling does not follow. When the moment of resolution arrives, it is possible to understand intellectually why it matters while feeling almost nothing about it. That is a significant failure of proportion in a film that invested in emotional pay-off.

Police officer Pavithran's character suffers from a related problem. The film establishes him as a petty and vindictive man willing to misuse his position to settle personal scores. That is an interesting starting point, but the screenplay treats it as sufficient explanation for everything that follows.

By the second half, Pavithran is making decisions that require far stronger psychological grounding. The actions he takes against Mary go far beyond pettiness; they suggest obsession. Yet the film never builds the emotional stakes or personal investment needed to justify such extreme behaviour. The leap between the man we are introduced to and the man we eventually see is simply too large. As a result, Pavithran begins to feel less like a fully realised character and more like a mechanism the screenplay needs to keep the conflict moving.

The questions that don't leave

The film's biggest questions are not the ones it leaves unanswered. They are the ones it raises without fully engaging with.

Why does Mary reject many legitimate opportunities to rebuild her life? For a woman whose entire existence is defined by protecting Luca, turning away from a safe and stable future demands a stronger explanation than the film provides.

Then there is the question of what happens after Mary's escape. If events unfold the way the film suggests, why does she not immediately return to Luca? The boy is left waiting for almost a day before the police eventually find him. The issue is not whether every detail needs to be explained. It is that the moment concerns the relationship the film has spent two hours asking us to invest in. More importantly, it determines the course of both their lives afterwards.

These questions linger because they sit at the heart of the characters' choices. They are tied to motivation, not information. Instead of fading with reflection, they become more noticeable because the film never fully addresses the emotional reasoning behind them.

Here's the trailer:

The distance between good and great

The film's problem is not that it lacks a strong screenplay. It is that the screenplay does not always spend time on the things that need it most.

The film is patient with Mary and Luca, but less generous with the surrounding characters. Pavithran needed more psychology than the film gives him. Abbas and Luca needed more moments together for their relationship to carry the emotional weight the climax demands. Most importantly, Mary's decisions needed stronger grounding, because the entire story rests on understanding why she chose this life for herself and her son.

None of these are major flaws in isolation. That is precisely the point. They are small screenplay decisions that quietly accumulate over the course of the film. Which is what makes Balan: The Boy such a fascinating frustration. So much of it works. The performances are excellent, the filmmaking is assured, and several moments carry genuine emotional power. Even the climax lands largely because of Chidambaram's execution and the strength of the performance. Yet one cannot shake the feeling that the story itself had the potential to hit even harder.

- Ends