‘With Love’ movie review: Anaswara Rajan’s cute rom-com lacks inner scaffolding

One of the sweetest moments in life is when we cross paths with someone from a distant path in a ‘small world’ moment. Say you knew of a Karthik who was your school senior in Chennai; almost a decade later, a man you meet mentions a Karthik in Chennai, would you connect the two to be the same person? After all, there might be many Karthiks in Chennai. Maybe the mention of the name might trigger a memory — perhaps Karthik meant a lot to you — but would you conclude or put your doubts out, interrupting a stranger talking about how they were in love with a Karthik they went to school with in Chennai? In With Love, Monisha (Anaswara Rajan) recognises that her date, Sathya Seelan (Abishan Jeevinth), is, in fact, her school senior when he casually mentions that he was once in love with a girl named Anisha while studying at a school in Trichy. “Wait, is that Anisha akka?” she instantly asks, before they exchange further information.

If you think all is good and any criticism over this is nitpicking, you may not have many complaints about With Love, which is still a simple, sweet romance-comedy that celebrates young love. But if you are someone who looks for convincing psychological ties between actions and reactions, you might find many instances in this film quite contrived. Or have a problem even with a harmless cameo appearance by someone close to Sathya (because why do they give a stranger who walks by them on a train a tiffin box and never even bother to get it back? You are asked to ignore it). With Love, directed by Madhan, is a straightforward rom-com that is aware of the emotional register it is aiming for, but lacks the substance to build to it organically.

In their meeting, Sathya and Monisha open up about their respective school-time romances. Sathya speaks about how he was in love with a classmate, Anisha (Kavya Anil makes a strong impression), and how it all came to a head, thanks to a traitor of a friend — a routine backstory sustained by humour. Monisha, an unruly backbencher, was in love with her class topper, Balaji (Sacchin Nachiappan), but circumstances never allowed her to express her feelings, and again, a betrayal seals its fate — a flashback with a beating heart, it also refreshingly shows a ‘love failure’ from a female perspective. These two backstories feature the strongest sequences; the many interesting coincidental overlaps between them make you smile, and director Madhan understands the beauty, innocence, and pangs of school-time romance. 

A still from ‘With Love’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

However, the very sentiment that propels the story forward from here, though written with the best of intentions, lacks the necessary emotional infrastructure. Monisha realises that they both have “an unexpressed love” in their past and decides to find their exes and express their feelings. Again, it’s an impulse many hopeless romantics daydream about, and someone might even actually think of doing it, but the film jumps a beat and asks us to take a leap of faith without addressing why they must dig up the past to move forward.

Given that the rest of the film follows the protagonists on this journey, it becomes of utmost importance that we know the emotional itch that needs resolution. Perhaps both of them struggle to get into anything meaningful without a closure to these chapters? We aren’t told.

Without any convincing psychological backing to this journey, the rest of the film rests on how they find Anisha and Balaji, and even in those regards, the film ends up with mixed results. The lack of conflicts seems quite apparent after a point, but what baffles one is how even ideas that could make way for some are resolved immediately, be it an arc about Saravanan’s school teacher character or one about Sathya snooping on Monisha. Ideas, though they appear good on paper, fail to translate into anything convincing on screen. When we reach the much-awaited reunion with Balaji and Anisha, you are left wondering why, when one is spelt out — little silences and awkward pauses intact — the other is written quite underwhelmingly.

It doesn’t help the film’s cause that the personal journeys of Monisha and Sathya do not flesh them out as anything more than what the larger plot wants them to be. There’s an intimate moment in the second half where they get quite close after a party, something Monisha later blames on the alcohol, much to Sathya’s dismay. Her casual reaction and his disbelief in her school of thought paint two extreme ideological backgrounds, but this is never addressed again.

The lapses in the story’s emotional beat are evident when Sathya suffers a heartbreak. A soup song sung by Yuvan Shankar Raja plays in the background, and while this is a great idea on paper (who else would Sathya, a hardcore Yuvan fan, listen to when he feels the blues?), you end up watching these proceedings with a straight face as the screenplay hardly tries to sell anything convincing to empathise with Sathya.

Anaswara Rajan and Abishan Jeevinth in a still from ‘With Love’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

It is also perplexing to see Sathya suddenly turn into someone quite immature for his age. At one moment, we see him, now an adult, mind you, get upset about the results of a game of FLAMES with Monisha — no, it isn’t even written as a comical moment. He appears quite hotchpotch as a character, and Abishan’s enactment of an eccentric young man seems performative rather than lived-in, especially in the older portions.

If anything, it’s Anaswara who ably carries the film. And yet, her character also gets underwritten. In the real world, a Monisha would have used her 1.9 million Instagram followers to get leads about Balaji and Anisha. It’s nice that our Monisha wants to do it the old-school way, but her only idea is to go back to their school and see if something comes up. The parameters she seems to set to measure her potential partner aren’t clear, nor are the boundaries she draws for herself. Even when Sathya does something comically extreme later, Monisha hardly addresses the concerning situation and is only bothered about where they go from there.

In an earlier scene at a cafe, a parallel between Monisha and an unidentified woman paints what it means to let someone be themselves; the other woman passive-aggressively polices Sathya for adding sugar to his coffee, but Monisha accepts him for who he is. Which is why she doesn’t consciously ask him to stop smoking and sees in him a responsible man when he finally does. And so, these ideas only make you imagine a story about how Monisha and Sathya would deal with something that challenges this acceptance of each other. The arc surrounding Saravanan’s character showed potential to help with this, but With Love doesn’t wish to play the long game. It instead settles for what comes easily, a quality that harms art and love.

With Love is currently running in theatres

Published – February 06, 2026 09:00 am IST