Harris Jayaraj has missed an amazing opportunity to turn Kadhal Reset Repeat into a genre-subverting crime thriller, which is about a stalker who follows a girl for decades and then uses a series of unfortunate incidents in her to isolate her from her loved ones, and manipulate her into believing she always loved him. But no, the composer had to pour as many saccharine romantic melodies into the film as possible to make you believe it is a breezy love story. However, even with the music, the corny dialogues, the formulaic attempts at humour, and director Vijay’s experience, all combining forces to insist that it is a sweet love story, we cannot help but notice the several troubling ideas propped up by Kadhal Reset Repeat.
Director: Vijay
Cast: Madumkesh , Jiya Shankar, Arjun Ashokan, MS Bhaskar
At the outset, the film is about Siddharth (Madumkesh) taking care of his childhood love Aditi (Jiya Shankar), who suffers from a form of amnesia that resets her memories after every day, which means he has to keep reminding every day that he is her boy friend and that he is taking care of her in an isolated cabin in the outskirts of Scotland. It sounds like a sweet premise until they quickly reveal that he was never her boyfriend, and to make matters worse, he has been following her since they were both kids, but never once confessed his feelings or even went up to her to say hello. This is probably the rose-tinted idealised version of what an incel stalker believes they are doing, swearing by their “true love,” which is supposedly pure because, even though they followed their love around, they always maintained a respectful distance. And no matter how many justifications the film throws at you, like Aditi’s boyfriend cheating on her or that her father being controlling, or her stepmother being rude, none of it makes Siddharth or his choices look appealing. It doesn’t help that newcomer Madumkesh delivers an extremely muted performance, side-eyeing Aditi and barely reacting to things around him. It is also painfully apparent that he is given the least amount of dialogue and is kept off-camera as much as possible. Even when he is talking, the camera anxiously cuts away to others' reactions every chance it gets. Jiya Shankar, on the other hand, tries her best to save the film, playing the ever-confused damsel in distress, Aditi. But the actor can hardly stop her character from making smooth-brained choices like believing someone she barely knows over her boyfriend and father.
Even seasoned performers like MS Bhaskar, Viji Chandrasekhar, and Jayaprakash suffer from a case of “vacant eyes staring into nothing,” simply because the writing is so powerfully bland that they were probably struggling to accept it before resigning to go through the motions. For example, after listening to her son passionately render his new tune on a piano, the mother slow claps as she walks towards him, and says with a smile, “Nee Ivlo nalla vaasikra na appo unakku yaaro pudichirukku nu artham. Avangala nee nalla paathukkanum.” And the boy is ten years old. Which mother of a young boy listens to her son come up with beautiful music, and her immediate response is to give him a character motivation that makes him obsessed with a girl for decades afterwards? That is at least a coherent use of language, unlike when Aditi’s boyfriend Arri (Arjun Ashokan) says to his girlfriend, “Naanum neeyum sendha adhu dhaan future…unga appa illa.”
Kadhal Reset Repeat fails to answer a lot of logical questions, like why doesn’t any of them make Aditi record a video so she remembers the events of the previous day? By the time she does, it is already the climax, and it gets doubly frustrating to know that they did think of this but waited until the end of the movie for convenience's sake. However, since the film already has several other issues, thinking of logical errors on top of that only makes you engage with the film on a level you do not want to be on by then. It might be easy to wish you have Aditi’s amnesia so you forget Kadhal Reset Repeat tomorrow, but engaging in such humour makes you no better than the film’s writing.