Awesome Threesome

Sweet Kaaram Coffee | Cast: Lakshmi, Madhoo, Santhy Balachandran | Director: Bejoy Nambiar | Tamil | Prime Video

A grandmother who ought to be grieving for her husband but is pining for her lost love. A wife who is devoted to her husband and son but is secretly suffocating. A daughter who is being gaslit by her cricketer boyfriend and being told that women’s cricket is still not “quite there”. All three women of the household decide to take a road trip to Goa, leaving the men to fend for themselves. The grandmother is convinced her son wants her to depart forever and join her husband. Her daughter-in-law is repeatedly told by her husband that she can’t take care of herself and has to be protected and sheltered. And the daughter just wants to get away from a broken heart. The magnificent Lakshmi, who plays the feisty grandmother, is the star of the show, but the lovely Madhoo (whom everyone remembers from Mani Ratnam’s 1992 classic Roja) shines as the woman who knows it all but is afraid to express herself. The journey is the joy in the series, which manages to rise above clichés with some fine performances and excellent cinematography. Is a second innings possible in life, whatever the age, if one stops operating from a position of fear? Yes, and Sweet Kaaram Coffee is here to show us how and why.

Why Watch it? An all-woman road trip spanning three generations, the catchline delivers exactly what it promises

Monster School

Adhura| Cast: Ishwak Singh, Rasika Dugal | Director: Gauravv K Chawla and Ananya Banerjee | Hindi | Prime Video

Boarding schools have been the sites for mystery, thrills and horror for a long time. Indian shows are only just beginning to tap into this rich genre with sufficient sophistication. School of Lies on Disney+Hotstar did so recently with a great degree of care, mapping the often suffocating mindscape of a group of boys stuck together in a remote location at a time of great physical and psychological change. Adhura returns to that territory with more than a taste of terror. The school is in Ooty in the middle of a forest, and therefore full of mist, clouds and green. It’s the site for first crushes, first heartbreaks, first lessons in adulthood. It is also where terrible bullying can take place. Survival skills are learnt. And those who don’t, carry the scars forever. The timelines shift between present-day and 15 years ago, when a young man was killed on the last day of school. When the Class of 2007 meets for a reunion, strange things start happening to the group. Is the ghost of one of them who was killed back to haunt them? And who killed him? The mystery takes time to unravel but in a way that teases and thrills.

Why watch it? Bone crunching, neck twisting, blood spurting action, with some emotional scenes. Ishwak Singh is excellent, as is Rasika Dugal

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