A pair of star-crossed lovers fight for their lives against a hungry crocodile in director Bejoy Nambiar’s surprising Tu Yaa Main, a masala adaptation of cult Thai survival horror film, The Pool.
Ms. Vanity aka Avani (Shanaya Kapoor) is one of Mumbai’s hottest content creators. With a following in the millions, a sprawling luxury estate, and a team of hot shot handlers directing her every move, she appears to have it all. Ala Flowpata aka Maruti (Adarsh Gourav), on the other hand, is a wannabe rapper who can’t seem to get his numbers above the low thousands, and in a country as big as India with a population of 1.4 billion, that’s just not going to cut it as a path to success.
When Vanity catches Flow using her mansion as a backdrop for one of his videos, she becomes smitten and the two become something of an unlikely power couple. However, when a monumental hurdle threatens to derail both of their careers, they are sent off from Mumbai to the resort town of Goa to cool down.
Only they never make it to Goa. Flow’s junkheap bike breaks down in the coastal jungles of India’s Arabian coast and they are forced to stop at a rundown marine resort on the cusp of shutting down for the off season. A million miles from anywhere, everything that can go wrong, does, and through an unfortunate series of events, they find themselves at the bottom of a poo, face-to-face with the crocodile that has been terrorizing the local villages. And so the duel begins.
Director Ping Lumpraploeng’s 2018 original film was a surprise hit on the festival circuit, perhaps more for its ridiculous shortcomings than its overall quality as an exercise in filmmaking. Many will recall its numerous nonsensical coincidences, its horrifying and yet necessary (?) animal death, and its baffling reliance on Pizza Hut product placement. The Pool was a success in spite of itself, a candy floss survival horror that brought fans just as many boisterous fits of laughter as genuine scares, and that was perfectly fine.
Tu Yaa Main takes the central conceit of a couple stuck at the bottom of an empty pool with a maneater and builds an actual, honest-to-goodness great movie around it.
Debutante writer Abhishek Bandekar expands on the concept and manages to build multi-faceted characters and arcs into the original story which was based more on increasingly ridiculous moments than any actual drama. Even with Tu Yaa Main laying out the danger in the opening 10 minutes with a pair of sequences that very clearly let the audience know that there is a very dangerous crocodile on the loose, it still manages to make you forget where the film is going by spending a generous amount of the script with Vanity and Flow, so that when they are in danger, the audience is invested in their survival. This is the kind of magic that only the best illusionists can pull off, showing you the trick first, and making you forget about it until they decide to unveil the prestige.
Everything that we love about The Pool does, Tu Yaa Main improves upon. From creating characters that we care about, to delivering moments of bone-chilling terror, to introducing comedic elements that are actually intentional, Nambiar and his two leads deliver in spades. Gourav’s scrappy Flow is a determined but flawed entrepreneur looking for a way out of his slum, while Shanaya’s Vanity is a Rapunzel character looking for a life away from her gilded cage of content creator fame back in the real world. The clash of class and culture provides ample drama within the confines of a very relatable story in a nation increasingly stratified by income inequality, along with all of the ancient caste divides that persist in spite of constitutional law that prohibits them.
Any time a popular film is remade, even one in the cult sphere like The Pool, the knee jerk reaction from a large swath of genre film fandom is, “why”? In the case of Tu Yaa Main, the answer is clear: because they could do better. Nambiar’s film evolves the property from guilty pleasure to something that the audience doesn’t have to apologize for enjoying. I adored The Pool, it was in my top ten films of 2018, but even I know that it was its audacity and no fucks given attitude that earned it that spot more than its objective quality. With Tu Yaa Main, we have a film that works as much as a romantic drama as it does a survival horror, and it excels in both areas. This is a film you don’t want to miss on the big screen, catch it while you can!