‘Tu Yaa Main’ (2026) Movie Review - Bejoy Nambiar's Toothless Romantic Thriller

The pleasures of Ping Lumpraploeng's The Pool lie in watching the gleeful smile of a hardcore sadist. Scene after scene, Lumpraploeng demonstrates how far he's willing to go to scare the daylight out of the audience. He achieves his results by unabashedly embracing the clichés and conventions of a survival thriller. Lumpraploeng doesn't care if he has to make things "convenient" or "unbelievable" to get your blood pumping. He, for instance, places duct tape inside the mouth of the crocodile just when the character trapped in the empty pool needs it. One lets out nervous laughs while watching that 2018 horror thriller. It is lean, mean, and unhinged. It is also incredibly entertaining.

With Tu Yaa Main, Bejoy Nambiar remakes Lumpraploeng's horror thriller by adding more meat to it. That "meat" converts it into a relationship drama concerning humans fighting against their circumstances, society, and two crocodiles. The original, with just one killer croc, was highly nasty. The remake, though it ups the danger, fails to be similarly menacing. It's not that Nambiar doesn't know how to create cheesy B-movie thrills. He tries to outdo Lumpraploeng by throwing a police car into the mix. But the problem with Nambiar is that he's too cool, too stylish. He doesn't have a raw, primal force in his filmmaking body.

Nambiar's images are silky smooth; they are bouncy. They have the verve and flow of an experimental music video. They pop. One could spend the entire film feasting on a Bejoy Nambiar composition. The gloss, the slick polish, is very pleasing to the eye.

But this visual style, instead of elevating the material, ends up undermining it. It acts as a wall between us and the story. Every image, every mood, every plot point becomes an aesthetic exercise. The movie turns into a collection of picture postcards running at 24 fps on the screen. When Maruti, aka Aala Flowpara from Nala Sopara (Adarsh Gourav), tells Avani Shah, aka Miss Vanity (Shanaya Kapoor), that she is glamorizing his poor domestic condition and selling it as a romantic fantasy, one feels like redirecting the same accusation at Nambiar, who sees Maruti's residential area as a lively place bustling with energy and activity. His representation of underprivileged life is precisely what Avani describes it to be: a tight space exploding with love, chaos, and vibrancy.

And as far as Avani's melancholic loneliness is concerned, it is brushed aside by a line that comes during the same scene where she prettifies slum life. Nambiar never dramatizes the characters' personal issues; he merely uses them as bullet points for an obvious lesson: do not judge anyone from the outside.

These issues, too, are clichés; they don't illuminate new aspects or dimensions. The best Nambiar offers is that he shows how, under stressful conditions, rosy romance can turn icy. The playful remarks ("She won't promote your product") take the form of accusatory taunts ("Couldn't you have screamed louder to attract the attention of a passerby?"). Yet Nambiar never allows Maruti and Avani's relationship to become too messy. There is never any danger of a breakup, no sense that the couple is on the verge of breaking point. This makes their reconciliation a foregone conclusion, not something arrived at organically.

Maruti and Avani—on local trains, while driving, at viewpoints—are seen talking, but most of those conversations are muted and presented as music montages set to pop beats. The discussions that we do hear are of the typical meet-cute variety and expositions designed to serve as character-growth devices. Maruti says his father left him when he was still a child. This returns later as a realization when Maruti, faced with the thought of becoming a parent, comments that he understands why his dad left him—he probably, like Maruti, wanted to chase his dreams.

Similarly, we get flashbacks of a car accident where Avani screams helplessly in the water while her parents die. Why? So that later we can see Avani save someone from drowning. She literally faces her fears—she screams at it. A nice idea, though I was more worried about the man beside her and wanted Avani to swim to the surface to resuscitate him.

Hence, as a relationship drama, it's impossible to take Tu Yaa Main seriously. By the end, you are still left with the feeling that while the characters can now define what love means to them, they have not really gotten to know each other deeply and meaningfully. They are just another tense situation away from breaking into another argument, another fight. Avani and Maruti's relationship remains superficial; they themselves appear skin-deep.

And as a "gutter ka godzilla" monster flick, Tu Yaa Main feels toothless due to Nambiar's sleek cinematic eye, which is devoid of a sharp bite.

Still, to give credit where it is due, Abhishek Bandekar approaches the remake correctly. He doesn't copy and paste what worked in the original. Rather, he borrows from the source only to recalibrate and expand it to a new setting.

What also works in Tu Yaa Main's favor are the performances of the leads. Gourav and Kapoor don't simply share a convincing, charming chemistry; they emotionally jell with each other. They add dimensions to their characters that the film only hints at or refuses to provide.

I am not a fan of Adarsh Gourav's early performances. They seem self-conscious, as if the actor is looking at the camera and asking us if he's being raw, real, and compelling. But he blew me away in Superboys of Malegaon—one of the few saving graces of an otherwise substandard drama—and he's equally terrific in this film.

I was also quite taken aback by Kapoor. She shows more range than the entire young cast of The Archies. I have a feeling she could be a revelation in the hands of the right filmmaker. There is a crocodile-sized talent within her waiting to be unleashed. I wish she would find that material soon. I will be eagerly waiting for that film.

Final Score- [5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times