‘Oho Enthan Baby’ (2025) Netflix Movie Review - Krishnakumar Ramakumar's Facile Romantic Comedy

Ashwin's familial life is far from bliss. His parents are always screaming at each other and fighting. The father is into astrology, and the mother is the breadwinner of the family. Astrology might have ruined his life, but the father ruins it further by being both a freeloader and a man who doesn't share household responsibilities. He neither washes dishes nor cooks. He doesn't clean the house or try to help Ashwin with his studies (then again, the only thing he can teach is astro nonsense, which Ashwin rightly considers as rubbish). Given how the marital discord infuses ugliness into personal relationships (Ashwin is slapped by his father at one point), the theater becomes a sort of emotional refuge for Ashwin and his uncle, Murali, the manager of a movie theater, can be seen as the person with the key who opens Ashwin's eyes to a world populated by romance and fantasy. How did Ashwin respond to movies that focused on toxic marriages and relationships, i.e., movies close to his home life? Did he walk out of them or learned anything substantial from such stories? If Oho Enthan Baby is to be believed, then Ashwin never came across such films, which is shocking considering he watches both regional and Western films. If Ashwin is a movie buff, he is a movie buff with a narrow taste and limited exposure to the masterworks of the cinematic medium. And the fact that he ends up becoming a movie director only accentuates how most of the young filmmakers today lack both style and substance. King (Redin Kingsley), the manager of an established actor like Vishnu Vishal, cites Love Today and Dragon as markers of success, which further highlights how those in power—who ought to break norms and champion experimentation—are instead trying to force young, emerging talents into a rigid, one-size-fits-all mold, gradually sanding away the filmmaker's identity, eccentricities, and imagination. Ashwin is asked to become the next Pradeep Ranganathan or Ashwath Marimuthu, and Krishnakumar Ramakumar is celebrated for turning into Ashwin (Rudra). 

But what's funny is that we are asked to laud the conception, the execution of a romance that's as old as the mountains. Ashwin would have learned his lesson without unnecessary fuss if he had exposed himself to good films instead of just too many films. As a young student, he was restricted to the screenings at the theater, which apparently only fed him impractical romances featuring meek women. This is why his list—the set of qualities he demands from his lover—includes laughable traits such as the other person should be so attuned to his wavelength that she should detect what's wrong with him without any hints or verbal indications. Thanks to these unreal, absurd expectations, Ashwin takes the bold, flirtatious gestures of Raveena (Vaibhavi Tandle), a senior, seriously and cries after discovering that she was just having fun with him, as she actually loves a boy named Christopher (how dare he break Ashwin's heart? Who does he think he is? Nolan?). Tandle brings the right amount of sensuality to this role. As Raveena, she knows what boys want and how to control them, play with them, with her sultry superpowers. She might as well be saying to herself, "I am sexy, and I know it." Ramakumar displays the power of his light touch during the scene where Ashwin finds out about Raveena's true love, and he shows Rasna's (Nirmal Pillai) proposal to Anjali (Nivashini) with an appealing mixture of sweetness and humor. But that's all Ramakumar achieves in Oho Enthan Baby. The other scenes, where the heavy, emotional stuff is undercut by jokes (as when a bird and an astrologer appear on a balcony), come across as amateurish. You can see Ramakumar acting like a family-friendly, people-pleasing director who doesn't want to put too much burden on the audience. When a movie director displays less concern about his story and more concern about the mood of his audience, he makes juvenile choices that merely point out the obvious. No wonder, then, King and Vishal not only say that Ashwin's story is non-linear, but they also discuss how Meera (Mithila Palkar) sees the shadow of his abusive uncle in Ashwin's angry demeanor and how Ashwin's ego prevents him from embracing his true love. A nine-year-old kid with basic intelligence can grasp these matters by just watching the film with complete attention and silence. 

But if Ashwin's idea of romance was developed by movies he watched in the theater, didn't those notions break or undergo certain changes when he, as an adult, started watching movies on his laptop? One assumes he must have gotten a subscription to various streaming services or could have satisfied his appetite by becoming a pirate. Didn't he watch Shoot the Moon or Thappad? We notice a poster of Tarantino, but what about other great, giant filmmakers? Didn't Ashwin expose himself to the world of Krzysztof Kieślowski, Wong Kar-wai, or Richard Linklater? Pedro Almodóvar has made biting relationship dramas, and so have Noah Baumbach, Asghar Farhadi, Danny DeVito, Ingmar Bergman, and Stanley Donen. Ashwin, however, seems to have watched particular kinds of unilluminating, simple-minded films. (Oho Enthan Baby unintentionally makes the case that the emerging, fresh voices should perhaps first dive into the broad field of movies before making their own movies if they want to avoid creating duds like Love Today, Dragon, and Tourist Family. Ramakumar, obviously, doesn't see his film this way, which is why he made something like Oho Enthan Baby.) As a result, the adult Ashwin, like the younger one, looks like a novice, a film virgin. The movies he has watched have not penetrated him; they have merely done foreplay with him. Hence, Ramakumar's film (and Ashwin's film within the film) itself is a big foreplay — it's a tease. I am not simply referring to the director's chaste handling of kissing scenes, but also his chaste handling of juicy, dramatic plot points. When Ashwin, in a fit of rage, throws a stone at the windshield of a vehicle, Meera gets flashbacks of her uncle's violent behavior (her casual remark about not liking action movies suddenly achieves some significance), and she raises a good point about Ashwin's action putting their driver in danger since the men, whose car Ashwin deliberately destroyed, took the photo of the vehicle. Ramakumar, though, leaves these suggestions hanging in the air. The driver quickly goes out of the picture, and the abusive angle is merely reduced to a device labeled "Conflict Generator." 

What physical or psychological harm did the uncle cause to Meera? How did she change her way of interacting with the people around her? He causes bodily harm to Meera's mother, but the effect of an incident like this is depicted in scenes that are related to Ashwin, so what you get is something as simple as Meera's sad expressions (not traumatic, just sad). An argument can be made to defend Oho Enthan Baby by saying that it's told from Ashwin's perspective, though that again only highlights the film's and the filmmaker's shortcomings. Writers Mukesh Manjunath and Sarada Ramanathan take the easy way out by offering us the viewpoint of a narcissist, whose narcissism becomes a license to flaunt the writers' lack of curiosity. How did Mysskin hire Ashwin? Does he take just about any self-professed movie buff as his assistant? How was the interview/selection process? Except for the meaning of true love (which feeds into the main narrative), what does Ashwin learn from his time working on the set? Does he have an opinion on the movie he is working on currently? Is there anything about Mysskin or his style that Ashwin likes, or did he discover something new and appealing about him while working with him? A great filmmaker separates himself from uncreative hacks by digging into places that are generally left untouched by someone just competent or ordinary. Ramakumar falls into the latter category. He's more concerned with somehow moving the wheels of a machine. When Meera tells Ashwin that her uncle doesn't allow cabs to enter the premises, so she called the ambulance to take her mother to the hospital, Ashwin cracks a lame joke related to this decision, which not only irks Meera but also the audience. Where is this insensitivity coming from? You can understand how destructive Ashwin's anger can be, but when he ignores Meera and answers his best friend Rasna's text messages, you regard him curiously. He and Rasna never seem as close as Meera and him. Yet, purely for the sake of so-called conflict, he prioritizes his friend over his romantic relationship.

Ashwin is often complimented for his entertaining storytelling skills. Characters mention that, more than the story, they enjoyed his narration of it. This narration is merely superficial — it merely presses a mechanical button titled "laughter." Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene where Ashwin tells a story of a lesbian. In the film's second chapter, Ashwin, as a college student, thinks something is going on between him and another college student, but she confesses to being in love with Anjali, Ashwin's friend. What happened after Anjali broke her heart? Ashwin doesn't go there. He — and by extension, Ramakumar — spin this story into a punchline, which feels grossly inappropriate and insensitive. Ashwin hijacks all the attention towards him, and Oho Enthan Baby, in a way, is about him growing to care about others, as well as understanding their perspectives. Even within these terms, the movie fails miserably. For starters, we are never fully immersed in Ashwin's viewpoint. We are placed at a distance, like outsiders, who can clearly tell when he's wrong and when he's right (only the second chapter indicates what the whole movie could have been in the hands of a filmmaker who values extreme subjectivity). In (500) Days of Summer (another film which the "cinephile" Ashwin should have made the effort to see, and the one that could have revealed his faults to him), Tom (initially) only recalls the good days of his love life, which is why he wonders in confusion why Summer left him. In Oho Enthan Baby, there is no distortion of memory to underline Ashwin's flaws and blind spots visually. He doesn't really discover anything about himself while narrating the script. There are no revelations, no epiphanies. Whatever definition of love Mysskin hands down to him, it's trite. 

Oho Enthan Baby, in the end, is a film of empty gestures that beg for your admiration, but only get your indifference. One of the images in the climax involves a woman rescuing a man from a minor explosion. It's exhibited as something revolutionary, extraordinary, though it's really insignificant. In place of well-intentioned yet lazy lines like, "Let's allow women to save men," it would have been far better if the movie had offered some agency to its female characters. We know Ashwin loves movies, but what about Meera? She is a nurse. Does she like her job? How did she get into this profession? Oho Enthan Baby slaps the tag of "nurse" and "cinephile" on its leads like a plot embellishment. The characters never have an in-depth conversation about their careers — what they like about them and what they dislike. This is why everybody comes across as little more than a puppet, satisfying the narrow, commercial demands of the film. There already exists a fantastic movie about a writer who introspects the highs and lows of his romance while narrating his script (it's also available on Netflix, at least in India). I am referring to Yandy Laurens's Falling in Love Like in Movies/Jatuh Cinta Seperti di Film-Film, which has more candor, more joy, more love for the cinematic medium than Oho Enthan Baby. Laurens wears his heart on his sleeve, while Ramakumar merely offers a simulation of romance and romantic feelings. Between these two filmmakers, it's painfully clear who has more heart and, thus, who the true romantic is.

Final Score- [3.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times