‘Mili’ Review: A Potent Survival Thriller Bolstered by a Powerful Performance

The first section of Janhvi Kapoor-starrer Mili is spent establishing a lead character who is almost too easy to root for. Mili Naudiyal, a nursing graduate, lives with her father after her mother’s untimely demise. She dreams of getting a job in Canada to secure her and her father’s future. Mili is the quintessential girl-next-door – she’s always helpful and has a ‘smile that lights up the room’. 

If you’re walking into the theatres having either watched the trailer or the original Helen, there is a sense of foreboding. Even otherwise, the use of (somewhat heavy handed) imagery and a melancholic soundtrack prepares the audience for what’s coming. 

Mili, directed by Mathukutty Xavier (who also directed the powerful original), is a survival thriller about a woman stuck in a freezer in an empty mall after-hours.

Survival thrillers have a very large scope when it comes to choosing an adversary – especially when it comes to the forces of nature. Films like Life of Pi, The Revenant or The Crawl all showcase the brutality of attempting to survive when odds are stacked haphazardly, but surely, against you.

In Mili, the stakes are multiplied by an added adversary – isolation, which then translates to a lower chance of survival and limited resources.

For centuries, ‘ice’ or the ‘cold’, in literature and text, have been representative of harshness, an unforgiving entity that barely lets anything survive. There are scores of stories about plants growing through sheets of ice, touted as stories of hope and rising against all olds. 

Mili, too, is a story of tenacity and perseverance and the makers’ ability to keep the audience hooked is worth appreciating. 

Even as Mili continues to devise plans and make attempts to escape her grueling reality, the film never shifts in tonality – the audience isn’t led to believe that all is well just because the protagonist is fighting, an unrealistic theme omnipresent in films filled to the brim with unrelenting machismo. 

A story of such strength needs a performance to match and Janhvi Kapoor as Mili delivers such a performance.

It is perhaps easy to ham up the tension and drama in a film like Mili but Kapoor’s performance remains restrained for the most part, making this one of the most effective roles of her career, even if some aspects of her act seem similar to the ones we’ve seen from her before. 

With little to no dialogues for a major chunk of the film, Kapoor manages to take the audience on the journey with her and in that silence, her craft truly gets a chance to come through. She is also supported by an extremely cohesive and able cast. 

Manoj Pahwa as Mili’s father plays his role with such conviction that it is easy to clue into his sense of urgency, desperation, and grief as a father trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together to find his daughter. Pahwa and Kapoor’s performances together manage to form a very strong emotional base for the film. 

One of Mili’s strengths is in its music and sound design. The music is credited to AR Rahman with lyrics by Javed Akhtar.

The film’s sound design, though overbearing at times, is always effective. The decision to make inconsequential and ambient sounds louder and louder as the clock ticks by, driving the film closer to its climax, is brilliant. 

For years, humans have used the phrase ‘there’s always a light at the end of a tunnel’. The idea that a light at the end of a dark tunnel is supposed to be uplifting goes to show how susceptible humans are to the tendency to hope and view adversity and grief as a stepping stone before ‘all is well’. 

So, when it comes to survival thrillers, the audience can’t help but hope for a happy ending but that presents the makers with a challenge – when the audience steps in prepared for one of two possibilities, how do you save your film from the clutches of predictability?

The answer lies in a strong script and nail-biting moments stacked one after the other. Mili ticks those boxes. It upholsters its ambitious storytelling with a well-structured execution. The film is also an example of how camerawork and editing can work hand-in-hand to create an immersive visual experience. Sunil Karthikeyan, behind the lens, uses carefree framing in the first half, lulling the audience into the sense of safety that Mili herself is experiencing. 

When the stakes are higher, Karthikeyan shifts to claustrophobic and enigmatic close-ups, giving the audience only as much information as the makers desire. The editing by Monisha Baldava complements this endeavor beautifully, with an ample use of match cuts to keep the focus shifting from Mili’s ingenuity to her father’s despair. 

On that note, some of the film’s metaphors and emotional stakes are too heavily dramatised, owing perhaps to the medium, but these are flaws that can be looked past for the sake of the bigger picture. And what a picture that is.