‘Saturday Night’ Review: Nivin Pauly film honours lifelong friendships

• Saturday Night is Roshan Andrews’ latest modern friendship film.
• Wild-spirited, quirky, childlike adventure freak replaces responsible, caring, honest friend.
• The film is a hyper-sanitized version.

Friendship road movies are the oldest coming-of-age films. Saturday Night is Roshan Andrews’ latest modern friendship film. In the first half, the misfit group of friends struggles alone. That feeling fades, hurting relationships.

Justin (Saiju Kurupu), one of the four friends, is humiliated by his debtors—surprisingly his college friends—over unpaid dues. Stanly (Nivin Pauly) shields his friend’s shame.

Each episode is a filler to reach the payoff of this life-changing idea. The film is a hyper-sanitized version of a late-40s man’s acid-trip friendship movie. Visual urgency characterizes friendship and chaos films.

Roshan Andrews is too refined to emulate the subgenre’s glossy style. He chooses the gloomy, archaic look for a film that balances goofy playfulness and urban philosophical inquiry into the mundane, purposeless life without honest companionship and invigorating memories. Films about confused, disoriented friends and their wild detours to self-discovery and reinvention share screenplay beats, tone, and acute human observations.

Stanly, a hipster who offers self-help from his old tape recorder, is novel. Wild-spirited, quirky, childlike adventure freak replaces responsible, caring, honest friend. Stanly, Justin, and Ajith (Siju Wilson) search for the youthfulness and genuine care that united them with their best friend from the past, Poocha Sunil (Aju Varghese), the story’s central figure.

Nivin Pauly’s zany book on mental illness and therapy evokes empathy. Saiju Kurup and Siju Wilson bring life to the damningly cold and distant losers who chose security over companionship and ended up in servile relationships of their own choosing. Varghese humanises the vagrant.

Grace Anthony’s overprotective wife and Justin’s girlfriend cum boss help the men escape. a workplace-humiliating partner. Vaishnavi (Sania Iyappan), the cliched independent, headstrong, travel freak with ponytails, types out the film’s main idea as a WhatsApp forward to another character in the second half. Jakes Bejoy’s score enlivens the screenplay.

Saturday Nights promises a fun time at the movies with a heavy touch on living in the moment and avoiding stiffness and forgetfulness that comes with mounting responsibilities and selfish denial of past pleasures and lasting friendship.

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