The film is set in 1995, in a village near Madurai. Caste lines are drawn thick. Family honour matters more than any one life. And the first half pulls you right into that world, into its toxic masculinity and its caste pride, until you can almost smell it.

What struck me most is how violence works here. It isn’t a problem. It’s the answer. Somebody dies, you beat someone up. You lose something, you pick up a weapon. Grief has no other outlet. There’s a line Karthi says to Subbu that sums up the whole rulebook. Roughly: hit anyone you want, hang them, kill them, but for god’s sake don’t cry. Think about that for a second. Killing is allowed. Crying is not.

And why is crying not allowed? Because crying belongs to women. In this world, anything that belongs to a woman is a weakness. Tears, tenderness, even something as basic as washing vessels. Every quality a woman has is treated like a defect a man must never catch. Women themselves are objects. When Dorothy is brought home as a bride, she’s described as a doll from Kerala. Not a person. A doll. And if a woman doesn’t follow the rules men have written for her, she’s killed, thrown away or shunned. She doesn’t get to exist in this world as herself.

The film shows you how early this starts. Young Subbu tells Karthi that his mother and sister were found dead in a well, and he says it like it’s nothing. Karthi tears up. Subbu tells him men don’t cry. A child who has already learned not to feel his own loss is teaching another child the same thing. That’s how the machine keeps running. Nobody has to force it. It gets passed down, one boy to the next.

Caste is part of the same machine. Karthi is from a lower caste, raised by his mother. Subbu is the son of Veeraiya, the moneylender who keeps the village in line with fear. Subbu doesn’t really care about Karthi’s caste as a kid. His father cares a lot. What I took away is that caste pride and toxic masculinity aren’t two separate problems in this film. They’re the same thing wearing different clothes. Both are about honour. Both need someone below you. And both run over women and lower caste people first.

Now the part of the first half I found fascinating. Karthi and Subbu’s journey from kids to adults. As boys, Subbu is the Bruce Lee fan who beats up the bullies and teaches Karthi how to be a man. How to walk, how to fight back, how not to cry. Karthi is the scared one, the soft one, the one who styles himself after Rajinikanth. Then they grow up and flip completely. Karthi becomes the hard one, the father’s right hand, the man who settles things with his fists. Subbu becomes the one who is afraid of blood and cries easily.

That flip says so much. Masculinity isn’t something you’re born with. It’s a costume. It’s taught, practised and copied, often straight from movie heroes. Karthi learned it so well that he became it. Subbu was the teacher, and it never fit him. He was performing all along. I also noticed that the two names come from the director’s own name, Karthi and Subbu. I don’t think that’s an accident. It feels like Karthik Subbaraj split himself in two and put both halves on screen. The man who learned the script and the one who couldn’t.

And it matters that the boys learn manhood from cinema. Bruce Lee. Rajini. Tamil cinema has taught generations of us what a man looks like. Here is a Tamil filmmaker using that same cinema to unlearn it.

Then Dorothy walks in. Keerthy Suresh has said she’s on screen for under half an hour, and yet the film carries her name. That tells you how much she means. Everything empathetic in this film comes from women. Dorothy doesn’t look at Subbu as a failed man. She sees Subbu for the person they are, and that scene between them is beautiful. Subbu’s feelings and vulnerabilities are known only to two women in the film. Nobody else gets to see them. Because in this food chain of a society, vulnerability is weakness, and there is no place for the weak. Karthi’s mother asks the question the whole film is built on. Why should crying belong only to women? One line, and the entire first half falls apart.

Then tragedy takes Dorothy, and Subbu breaks.

The twist is where the film earns the word brave. Subbu never wanted Dorothy. Subbu wanted to be what Dorothy was. Subbu is a trans woman. And suddenly the opening scene means something else. The film opens with Karthi calling Subbu’s father to say the job is done, that he has killed Subbu. The first time you see it, it’s a murder confession. By the time you understand it, it’s something worse. A father sent his son’s best friend to kill his own child. He would rather have a dead son than a living daughter. That’s honour killing with every excuse stripped away.

There’s a lovely choice in how the film looks. The past is in colour and the present is in black and white. Usually films do it the other way, with the past in grey nostalgia. My read is that the present is grey because it’s the world at its most honest. The world that has decided someone must die for existing.

Sananth’s transformation and everything that follows is, for me, the best part of the film. What he does with Subbu’s body language and silences after the reveal is incredible. And Rishikanth matches him as Karthi. The second half becomes Karthi’s journey. He’s been sent to kill the new Subbu. He has every reason the world has given him. And every time he gets close, his conscience stops him. Some reviews felt this stretch goes on too long. I felt it was the point. Unlearning twenty years of conditioning doesn’t happen in one speech. It happens in small refusals, again and again, until one day you realise you can’t go back.

The conversation between the new Dorothy and Karthi about transphobia, about how toxic this society is and how deep the conditioning goes, broke me. I cried. There’s also a moment where a trans woman Karthi had mistreated earlier tells him that in ten years, people like her will be the normal ones and this town will look down on people like him. That line stayed with me. Normal isn’t a fact. It’s just what most people agree on right now. And that can change.

Watching Karthi finally accept Subbu for the person she is, followed by the Muthumani portion and the final Dorothy reveal, was incredible. I haven’t felt a climax land like that in a while.

And what do I even say about Ilaiyaraaja. This is his first film with Karthik Subbaraj, and I bow down to the genius in him. Muthumani is a trance number sung by Raaja himself with Shweta Mohan, and it carries the climax. Then there’s the Veedu theme. The score has a piece called “How Else to Name It?”, a new version of his own work from How to Name It, the same music Balu Mahendra used so beautifully in Veedu. These days every other film borrows a Raaja song to stir up some quick nostalgia. Here Raaja uses his own music, and it felt like he was telling all of them, you use my music for nostalgia, but watch how it’s actually done. That portion was so, so good.

It takes immense guts to make this film in a homophobic and transphobic world. The reaction proves it. Since release, a section of the audience has gone after the film online, saying it shows Tamil culture in a bad light. I think that reaction is the film’s point being proven in real time. The film is asking whether we can make room for people who don’t fit the script, and some people’s answer is to get angry at the question.

Dorothy shakes you. Dorothy shocks you. Dorothy wakes you up. It makes you question yourself and the society around you, and it asks the uncomfortable questions most of our cinema has been too scared to ask. Who gets to cry? Who gets to be soft? Who gets to exist as themselves? For me, it’s the most progressive film in recent times.

I watched Obsession this morning and I keep coming back to one thing. People call it grey, and it is, but grey isn’t vague. Curry Barker built that greyness on purpose, piece by piece, and the more I sit with how he did it, the better the film gets. So let me get into what’s actually going on under the plot, because the plot is the least interesting part of this.

Start with the curse, because most people read it wrong. The One Wish Willow isn’t cursed. Barker has said this outright. If you wished for something that couldn’t hurt anyone, you’d probably be fine. The willow is just a tool. What’s cursed is Bear’s specific wish. He doesn’t wish to be braver, or for one honest shot with her, or for Nikki to be happy. He wishes for her to love him more than anyone in the world. And there is no clean way to grant that. To make someone love you on command, you have to switch off the part of them that gets to choose. The wish can’t hand Bear real love, because real love needs a free yes, and the second you force the yes it stops being love and becomes ownership. So the curse isn’t bad luck or a trick. It’s baked into what he asked for. He asked to remove her will, and the wish did exactly that, perfectly.

That’s the whole engine of the film. It was never about magic. It’s about what it means to take someone’s choice away and call it romance.

Which brings me to what actually takes Nikki over, because it isn’t a demon. There’s no possession in the usual horror sense. The thing wearing Nikki’s body is the wish itself. It’s Bear’s desire given a body and nothing else, a version of her that exists only to want him and keep his attention. The real Nikki gets pushed down into the back of her own head. And here’s the part that makes the whole film work. She’s awake in there the entire time. She sees everything. She’s a prisoner watching her own body do things she would never do.

That’s why the scariest moments have no blood in them. The scene where she’s drugged and half asleep and the real her surfaces for a second to beg Bear to kill her, because death is better than being trapped. The phone call where Bear is on the line trying to undo it and you can hear her screaming somewhere underneath. Even the moments in bed where her voice is saying one thing and her eyes are completely empty, because the person who would actually mean it isn’t there. Those land harder than any of the killings. The murders are loud. Those quiet moments are the sound of a real person still in there, reaching out, getting no help. The horror of this film isn’t the gore. It’s the loss of agency, shown from the inside.

And the wish version of her will do anything to keep his attention. That’s where the lunchbox comes in. She digs his dead cat out of the trash and packs it into his lunch as a sandwich, with a cheerful little note. It’s grotesque, but it’s also just the logic of the wish taken to the end. She has to be devoted to him above everything, so of course it comes out as something monstrous. That scene is the moment the fantasy curdles, where even Bear can’t pretend this is the girl he wanted.

Now the hard question. Why is Bear grey, and not just a sad guy who made a mistake.

Here’s where Barker is sneaky. He sets Bear up so you root for him. He’s lonely. His cat just died. He’s awkward and soft and can’t get a sentence out around the girl he’s wanted for years. You feel for him. And then the film quietly shows you that he knows. There’s a scene at the restaurant where he asks Nikki if she loves him more than anyone in the world, which is the exact wording of his wish. She asks why it matters. He says it doesn’t matter to him. That’s the moment. That’s him checking that the wish took hold, and deciding he doesn’t care that her love isn’t real. He would rather have the fake yes than the real Nikki.

But I still don’t think he’s the villain, and I don’t think the film wants you to land cleanly there either. That’s the grey. Bear isn’t scheming. What he’s doing is worse in a quieter way. He half-knows from early on and he refuses to look at it, because looking means admitting what he did, and admitting it means going back to being alone. So he keeps choosing not to know. He tells himself he’ll fix it later. He can’t even work out how to undo it once he tries. He’s not evil. He’s weak, and grieving, and so scared of being lonely that he lets himself not understand the thing he completely understands. That’s a more uncomfortable character than a villain. A villain you can dismiss. Bear you recognize.

And under all of it is what the film is really about, which is avoidance. A crush is a lack of information. Bear isn’t in love with Nikki, he’s in love with the version of her he built up over years of watching from a few feet away. He never actually risked finding out who she is. The film even hands him the off ramp. Right before the wish, Nikki straight up asks him if he likes her. That’s the entire movie avoided right there. One honest answer. Instead he denies it, negs her, and snaps the willow. The wish is just what cowardice looks like when it finally gets a weapon. He couldn’t survive a real no, so he manufactured a yes. Everything after that is the price of one conversation he wouldn’t have.

Then the ending, which closes every loop. The wish only breaks when the wisher dies, so Bear works out that the only way to free Nikki is to kill himself. He takes the pills. And he can’t even do that cleanly. At the last second he panics and tries to throw them back up, because of course he does, because he has never once been able to follow through on anything that costs him something. That flinch is the whole character in one shot. And then, in the cruelest move in the film, his last moments aren’t even his. The wish pulls him to her and he dies under a spell too, a prisoner in his own body, which is exactly what he did to Nikki. He ends up with her fate.

There’s a smaller loop I keep noticing too. His cat died from getting into his pills at the start. The same pills he uses to end himself. The carelessness that killed the cat is the thing that kills him.

And here’s what makes it all land. When Bear dies, the spell breaks and Nikki finally wakes up. Alone. Covered in blood. Standing over the bodies of her friends that her own hands killed while she was trapped inside, screaming. She did none of it and she is the one left to answer for all of it. The person whose choice was stolen is the one who pays. The person who stole it got to escape into death. That isn’t a happy ending and it isn’t even a fair one. It’s the bleakest version available, and it’s the honest one.

So when people ask what Obsession is about, I don’t think it’s love gone wrong. I think it’s about the difference between love and obsession, and the film treats them as opposites, not two ends of the same thing. Love wants the other person to be free. Obsession wants them kept. Bear called it love the entire time, right to the end, and he never once asked what Nikki wanted. That’s the grey. That’s why I can’t stop thinking about it.

The Girlfriend (My thoughts)

I watched The Girlfriend last night, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Rahul did something that most films are too scared to do: he didn’t give us the catharsis we’re trained to expect.

What got me was how the film builds its characters from the ground up. Vikram doesn’t wake up one day and decide to be controlling. Bhooma doesn’t stumble into a toxic relationship because she’s naive. The film shows you their childhoods, their conditioning, and suddenly you understand why breaking patterns feels less like a decision and more like dismantling your entire foundation. That’s real. That’s what makes it hard.

There’s this scene where Bhooma meets Vikram’s mother – just one scene, hardly any dialogue – and Rohini’s eyes tell you everything about a woman who spent her life shrinking herself. And you realize: this is what Vikram thinks love looks like. This is what he wants to recreate. That’s not the film being dramatic; that’s just how conditioning works.

The film’s visual language does a lot of heavy lifting. Rashmika’s face as she watches a movie and cycles through confusion, hope, fear, resignation – all in one sequence. The cramped bathroom that becomes a visual metaphor for how suffocating this relationship is. The shower scene before interval that doesn’t need a single word of dialogue. These aren’t just pretty shots; they’re doing the emotional work that dialogue can’t.

But here’s what I really want to talk about: agency. Or the lack of it. Or the fight for it.

In a typical Indian household – and the film gets this right without spelling it out – the concept of free will is different for men and women. It’s not just different in degree; it’s different in kind. Vikram operates from a place where his desires shape reality. When he wants something, the world bends. When Bhooma wants something, she has to negotiate with her father’s fears, society’s judgments, and now Vikram’s need for control.

The film doesn’t solve this with some grand feminist awakening. It doesn’t give us a scene where Bhooma suddenly “finds her voice” and everything’s fine. What it does instead – and this is what makes it important – is show you the actual cost of trying to claim agency in a system designed to deny it to you. The weight of that struggle. The fact that you don’t just walk away; you have to dismantle every learned response, every internalized rule, every voice telling you that your discomfort is your fault.

There’s a scene where Bhooma’s father finds out about the relationship and demands her transfer certificate from the college. The Head of Department refuses. He asks: “Why should she leave? Why should she be punished?” That question landed like a punch because that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? Women are conditioned to carry the shame, to disappear, to make themselves smaller so everyone else can be comfortable.

The film doesn’t give us easy answers. It doesn’t have Bhooma become some empowered woman who’s “healed” by the end credits. What it does is show the beginning of something – the realization that this isn’t normal, that love shouldn’t feel like suffocation, that “he loves me” doesn’t justify everything. And maybe that’s more honest than any triumphant ending could be.

Living in a man’s world doesn’t mean you wake up one day and smash the patriarchy. It means you spend your life navigating tiny negotiations – what you wear, where you go, how you laugh, who you love, how you love. And when you finally decide to push back, it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like betrayal. Of your upbringing, your father’s sacrifices, the man who “only wants what’s best for you.”

That’s what Rahul captured. Not the moment of liberation, but the messy, painful, lonely process of even recognizing that liberation is something you deserve.

As a product marketer, my current experiment with Product-Led Growth (PLG) has underscored the critical importance of understanding the different parts of the funnel. Here’s a detailed look at my insights and approaches:

🚀Awareness Stage: Showing Value from the Start

In the awareness stage, the goal is to demonstrate the Value of the product as soon as potential customers discover it. This is where hyper-personalization plays a vital role. As product marketers, we must create precise customer segments based on various data points such as industry, user behavior, and business goals.

Key Steps:

• Data Collection: Work closely with the onboarding team to capture comprehensive user data during product installation.
• Segmentation: Use this data to create customer segments that allow for targeted and relevant communication.
• Personalized Messaging: Trigger specific messages that highlight features most relevant to each segment, ensuring our communications stand out in an overcrowded inbox.

🚀Driving Awareness and Discovery

Understanding what resonates with different customer profiles during the awareness stage is fundamental. This knowledge informs not only our initial engagement strategies but also the long-term customer journey.

Learning Points:

• Customer Profiles: Identify and analyze which profiles engage with specific features and understand the problems these features solve.
• Feedback Loop: Continuously gather and analyze customer feedback to refine and adapt our messaging and feature promotion.

🚀Strategic Monetization: Upsell and Cross-Sell

The insights gained during the awareness and discovery stages are invaluable when planning to monetize the product. Whether through upsell or cross-sell strategies, having precise data points about customer segments enables hyper-personalized approaches that drive results.

Monetization Strategies:

• Data-Driven Decisions: Utilize the data collected to understand which customer profiles are most likely to benefit from additional features or higher-tier plans.
• Personalized Paths: Create personalized upsell and cross-sell paths based on the problems each segment is looking to solve and the features they value most.

🚀The Continuous Loop: From Onboarding to Education

PLG is a continuous cycle that begins at the awareness stage and extends through onboarding, user engagement, and beyond. By understanding user-profiles and refining our strategies based on real-world feedback, we ensure that our upsell and cross-sell motions are not just effective but also aligned with customer needs.

Key Elements:

• Onboarding Collaboration: Work closely with onboarding teams to capture detailed user data and refine customer segments.
• Educational Materials: Develop top-class educational materials, feature use cases, and customer stories to support users throughout their journey.
• Feedback and Adaptation: Regularly research and engage with customers to understand how our messaging and features are helping them and adapt strategies accordingly.

Setting the stage with precise segmentation and personalized communication is crucial.

This foundation supports all subsequent efforts, ensuring that our PLG strategies are effective and customer-centric.