LIK Movie Review:
Algorithms have taken over everything... from classrooms to living rooms. Comfort aside, the line between support and control is increasingly obscured. It's befuddling to let your flights of fancy determine where all this ends, if it all. In Love Insurance Kompany (LIK), director Vignesh Shivan has touched upon the theme of futuristic romance, which is pregnant with promise. With a story idea of endless possibilities, the limit is your pen running dry. But LIK is terrifyingly basic. The quasi-future setup restricts itself to the romantic conflicts, leaving gaping holes in world-building. What is more painful than an irredeemably bad film is a film that squanders opportunities.
LIK begins in 2040 in Chennai, where Suriyan (SJ Suryah), the founder of the titular app, praises it as a foolproof tool for finding a romantic partner, and even calls it... God. It goes through your likes, dislikes, and everything in between, and gauges you on a love meter. However, the app comes under fire after Vibe Vasudevan (Pradeep Ranganathan)'s love meter becomes incompatible with social media influencer AKA loosu ponnu — a species that survives even the information and technological boom of 2040 — Dheema (Krithi Shetty). Vasu, who doubles as the voice of the app's AI assistant, is now forced to turn against the organisation to win over Dheema, who follows LIK like a holy scripture, and decides to dump Vasu.
Returning to the gaping holes in the world-building, barring the well-made 'Pattuma' song, there's a lot to be desired in Vignesh's writing. The song, set in Chennai in 2040, teases Cooum Cruises and the fancy rebranding of Amma Unavagam and Co-Optex into swanky buildings. But, except for a couple of shots, everything shown in 2040 Chennai revolves around how people are benefiting or losing out because of the LIK app. From the bajji shop proprietors to the plutocrats, the sole concern is about the app. You wonder if SJ Suryah is named Suriyan in the film because, from quotidian to extraordinary, every occurrence revolves around him or his app. The sloppy world-building would still have been fine if the audience had at least been made privy to the workings of the app and its dangerous scope. That would have still been an exhilarating watch. The makers have visibly struggled to design a rule on how the app operates and what its limitations are. How does it calculate the compatibility? What could cause a spike or a drop in the love percentage? Are there ways humans could manipulate its function? And what happens if it malfunctions? Except for the hologram ring and Suriyan saying he hasn't designed an app but a God, the film makes a lame attempt to convince us that the app is any better than any present-day dating apps.
Cast: Pradeep Ranganathan, Seeman, SJ Suryah, Krithi Shetty, Gouri G Kishan
Director: Vignesh Shivan
The film reeks of artificiality and half-heartedness when the narrative decides to show something beyond the application. On the one side, you have your flying cars, and in the next shot, you see ordinary four-wheeled cars on the roads. Nor are there any suggestions that Chennai in 2040 is an Orwellian dystopia in which one part of the city is privileged and the other impoverished. Simply put, the writing team may have decided to limit its futuristic innovations to the app, which is also basic. Speaking of two different worlds, there is an organic world, a rehabilitation centre/prison for social media addicts. Run by Vasu's father (Seeman), other than smashing their phones against the wall, nothing is really special or different about the place. How they cope with the addiction is not known. Attempts at humour in these places were a hit and miss. In a locality far removed from the sophistication, retrieving phones and placing cameras inside the premises are done without breaking a sweat. Even new visitors can access the security room and turn the jammer on and off. If the rest of Chennai shown in the film shifts back and forth between 2026 and 2040, Organic World, which is claimed to be a phone-free zone, is anything but that.
What salvages the film to an extent is the intermittent flair in the performances. Pradeep, with some new wacky gestures, helplessly trudges through his less-than-unidimensional character. SJ Suryah and Seeman steal the show on more than one occasion. However banal it may be for a particular scene to have SJ Suryah utter long lines, he carries an infectious gusto, making his presence enjoyable. Carrying his real-life persona to the screen, Seeman's chaste Tamil seemed fresh (how ironic). Wish there were many more scenes involving Seeman and SJ Suryah. One such scene delivers his political message, which was humourous and also a huge theatrical moment. Krithi Shetty and Gouri G Kishan have been underutilised. While Krithi's arc looks undercooked, shockingly, a competent performer like Gouri has no arc at all. Despite the narrative flirting with a triangular romance, we know little about Gouri's Kalki, including her feelings for Vasu.
Love Insurance Kompany introduces a lot of promising ideas only to suffer a dramatic fall, more dramatic than the film itself. Like Gen Z films that make token cultural references, LIK has refurbished the overdone social media interface with a specious futurism. The film could only boast about introducing a new social media platform interface. Living in a generation that coined terms like "brain rot" and "doomscrolling," there is definitely a pressing need to put our phones down. Theatres, to a certain degree, act like the Organic World shown in the film, training our focus on a single thing and controlling the restlessness to pick up the phone. LIK robs us of that...