You feel happy when you discover a gem of a movie randomly among countless available to watch on Netflix. At the surface the movie looked like a love story of a common man stuck in everyday life but, like an onion, the more you peel the more you find and by the time you get to the core, it leaves you with tears rolling down your cheek.

What I am amazed when I see Malayalam movies is how deeply rooted they are in the culture of Kerala. The only state where I feel Muslims, Christians and Hindus are equally represented in the movie industry. This mixture leads to a great recipe where the cultural nuances of people are shown vividly. This movie is a lesson on the color, costumes and smell of land. The two things that stood out in my view were

The struggle of a common Muslim family in today’s overly sensitive and largely divided society. The elder bother of the protagonist wants to get a passport to travel abroad for livelihood but, he struggles to get the police to sign off as he has been involved with some questionable situations earlier in his life. On the contrary, nowhere in the movie, the police are shown to be illogical or cruel. The story never takes sides which is the norm in most one dimensional stuff dished out.

A funny sequence is when, to be married couple are shown attending sex education class (it starts that way in the scene) in a church. I never knew how these small christian customs are embedded into our mainstream Indian society where sex is generally considered taboo particularly when it comes to a place of worship. I wish more cultures practicied this.

Annayum Rasoolum is about how these two people from different religious backgrounds fall in love. The beauty is, this is more than a simple love story, it is a chronicle of the struggle to survive in this complex muti-dimensional world

Sometimes I wonder how we discover anything in life, it is a big puzzle! I usually find some of the most interesting movies of the year by looking through the foreign language nomination list during the awards season.

I found this interesting movie Loveless this year by a Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyaginstev. I often think a movie at an award ceremony is a result of lot of previous work by the film maker so, I started peeping into his films where I discovered "The Return, his feature film debut.

I rented the movie on Amazon and started without reading anything about it, it is hard to do that in today's times as I often feel I should not waste my time. I am usually tempted to read what others feel rather than keeping the curiosity going.

The movie starts out with a haunting score and two bothers struggling to come to grips with sudden return of their father, someone they have never seen in flesh and blood. The boys are left wondering about his mysterious appearance, the director smartly puts us at the centre of the family like we are the third invisible brother.

The father decides to take them out on a vacation and every interaction they have together is strange and difficult to make sense of. He is trying to teach them about life in his own way. The brothers react differently to their father thus creating a very interesting piece of drama.

The movie kept me on the edge until the final act which felt like pulling the rug under my feet. I ended up with disbelief on what was happening and if the father was preparing the kids and the audience for this kind of eventuality.

I had a great time watching it.