The director’s previous film Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey also centred on marriage and was a black comedy but this one is a comedy drama that’s centred around Vinu Ramachandran’s (Basil Joseph) wedding.

The premise

Vinu works in Dubai and after suffering from a heart break-up for five years, he finally decides to get hitched. It is all thanks to his future brother-in-law Anandan, (Prithviraj Sukumaran) who constantly advises him to forget his ex-girlfriend Parvathy and marry his sister Anjali (Anaswara Rajan), that Vinu agrees to get hitched. As Vinu grows closer to Anjali, he develops a very strong bond with Anandan whom he considers an elder brother and confidante.

He soon learns that Anandan has had some issue in his marriage and as a return favour, convinces him to get back with his wife so they can all be one big happy family. However, fate seems to have others plans for both Vinu and Anandan and Vinu’s past life and wrongdoings come back to haunt him right before marriage. A shocking revelation throws their friendship and Vinu’s marriage in jeopardy and everything he touches turns to disaster. What is this revelation? And does Vinu finally get married to Anjali?

Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil is a Vipin Das-directorial that has been written by Deepu Pradeep. Both the director and writer seem to be in complete sync as the comic caper they have delivered is a laugh riot, despite some of the cliches. Pradeep has written a wedding drama that has humour interwoven beautifully into the situations that arise at every turn. He establishes the comic factor right from the get go and as the film progresses you see various characters being slowly introduced to take the story forward. So if you have Yogi Babu at one point, then you have his office colleague at another.

The performances

While one may say there are too many characters at one point, it luckily doesn’t spoil the narrative of this wholesome family entertainer. As for Vipin Das, he has on board a talented cast who have made this film all the more festive thanks to their strong performances.

Prithviraj Sukumar, who is a co-producer on this project, comes off the back of his serious survival drama Aadujeevitham (The Goat Life) into this comedy drama. The role of Anandan requires perfect comic timing and expressions to suit the funny situations, and the talented Malayalam star has shown that he can deliver in such a role too. Prithviraj has tried to break out of stereotypes time and again and this film shows that he can not just essay roles with emotional depth but light-hearted ones as well. In fact, he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed playing Anandan in this film.

Final thoughts

In Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil, Das has once again teamed up with Basil Joseph with whom he worked in his 2022 blockbuster, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey. Basil is known for his restrained performances where the humour comes off his expressions and dialogue delivery. And he is a delight as Vinu, someone who lacks confidence and believes he’s a lion though he’s just a cat. Nikhila Vimal and Anaswara Rajan have smaller but impactful roles while the rest of the large cast deliver what is required.

Music director Ankit Menon, who has worked with Vipin Das earlier, has scored the music for this film. He has combined some new age beats along with traditional music, like the wedding song. If we saw Ilaiyaraaja’s Tamil song from Guna (1991) being the highlight of the recent Manjummel Boys, in this film it is the Tamil song Azhagiya Laila from director Sundar C’s Ullathai Allitha (1996) that is the highlight.

Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil is a complete laugh riot, coupled with splendid performances, that families will thoroughly enjoy. Prithviraj Sukumaran has another winner on his hands.

When Australia’s George Miller came here in 2016 to serve as jury president, just months after his “Mad Max: Fury Road” won six Oscars, he swept in like a conquering hero. His movie was undeniable: a reinvigoration of both his career and the action genre. Often, the relationship between Cannes and the blockbuster directors it invites comes off as strained — see French artist Zaho de Sagazan serenading “Barbie” filmmaker and this year’s jury president Greta Gerwig at Tuesday’s opening ceremony — but with Miller, the moment felt right.

Things change. His “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (in theaters May 24), a somewhat dutiful new prequel to “Fury Road,” had its world premiere out of competition Wednesday, unspooling at the capacious Grand Lumière Theatre to a rapt audience that, it must be said, didn’t laugh once. “Who laughs at the end of the world?” you may ask. But that would be to deny Miller the richness of his grungy post-apocalyptic series, one that pairs brutal action sequences with emotional resonance, dark mythmaking, sociopolitical alarm and, yes, the odd Ozploitative chuckle at some catastrophic personal misfortune.

Some of that is in evidence in “Furiosa,” but nowhere near enough. For the first time in Miller’s now-five-film franchise, he seems to be falling shy of the immediacy he’s sustained, often deliriously, for an entire feature. Any prequel would necessitate a certain distance: This is what happened before the story you already know. And if you ever confused Charlize Theron’s hollowed-out stare in “Fury Road” for a lack of backstory (that’s actually the performance you’re noticing), “Furiosa” is here to supply that material for you, not unentertainingly. But with every supersaturated blue sky, russet-colored desert shot and faux-literary chapter heading (“2. Lessons from the Wasteland”), the movie gets further away from feeling like a tale that’s happening, to one that’s already been told, cleaned up and prettified.

Miller still mounts a story more confidently than just about anyone on the planet, and his kickoff, a 10-minute, near-wordless chase, is the definition of getting off on the good foot. A ferociously protective mom (the wonderful Charlee Fraser) trails, on horseback and motorcycle, a gang of kidnappers who have fled with her preteen daughter Furiosa (Alyla Browne, expressive during the film’s first hour). The latter, while unfortunate to be caught, is resourceful in her own way, chewing through fuel lines and blessed with the benefit of an especially prescient name. Flung over the back of a bike, her long hair flowing in the wind, the shot brings to mind to another defiant woman in Miller’s 1982 “The Road Warrior.”

A word about that stone-cold classic: By dint of the technology that was then on hand (i.e., no digital effects and a nutso stunt crew), “The Road Warrior” throws you into bodily panic with every kinetic setup. “Furiosa” rarely feels dangerous. Too much of its blood and fire is the work of computers, and for the first time, that work is obvious. There’s something very un-“Mad Max” about this; the tactility of the earlier films fed into the realness of potentially surviving the fall of civilization, even if that meant coming face to face with a tyrannical Tina Turner.

But the punkish spirit of the young Furiosa — forced to sit in a cage like a sad pet — goes a long way to setting up our connection with the story. Less so her captor, Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth, who, though he tries hard to build an arm-swinging, cape-wearing, motormouthed swagger, doesn’t have the lines to give his gang leader the kind of vanity we could relish in a villain. Eventually we get those bleach-pale War Boys from “Fury Road” again, along with the monstrously masked Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), his thuggish mutant son Rictus (Nathan Jones) and a geographical trade war that’s a bit more complex than it needs to be.

Miller, who with co-screenwriter Nick Lauthoris worked out these script details before they approached “Fury Road,” mainly have their sights set on a centerpiece that comes close to redeeming the entire film: a lavishly armed War Rig truck barreling down an endless highway, hounded by attackers with propellers strapped to their backs. Finally, the grandeur of the older movies is here, as is Anya Taylor-Joy, whose Furiosa has now gone through her Yentl-passing-for-a-boy phase and now seems meant to wear a glamorous black smudge on her forehead and learn everything she needs to know about “road war” from Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke of “The Souvenir,” channeling the Leone-esque minimalism that marked Mel Gibson’s original antihero).

Tom Burke and Anya Taylor-Joy in the movie “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”

(Jasin Boland / Warner Bros. Pictures)

We have a lot to learn about road war as well. What’s a bommy-knocker? (I won’t spoil it, but generally, you pay extra for that option.) There’s a finding-your-calling film built into “Furiosa” — maybe it took the apocalypse for this former fruit-picker to discover what she does well — plus a hint of a front-seat romance that’s never made explicit. But just as the movie is hitting its stride and Simon Duggan’s cinematography settles down, Miller strays back to a less-exciting vengeance narrative.

Much has already been made of Taylor-Joy’s lack of dialogue — hardly a drawback when you take in her burning stares and see how potently she’s making something out of nothing. If the movie has a deficiency (and it does), it’s not one of exposition but euphoria. The “Mad Max” universe was never that cautionary, not if you yourself ever wondered how you’d make it through societal meltdown and what kind of mohawk you’d get. The exhilaration of the polecats sequence in “Fury Road” — that fact that there’s such a thing as polecats — made the series a constant source of glee.

“Furiosa,” to its distinction and detriment, ends up being too self-regarding, too downbeat. It takes the fun out of survival. Miller’s imagination has fed into “The Last of Us,” “Fallout” and a host of other grayscale nightmares for movies and TV. He knows better than anyone that forward momentum is key to a “Mad Max” movie. Leave the prequels to those who don’t have any gas left in the tank.

1 of 5 | Anya Taylor-Joy is “Furiosa.” Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

So Dementus keeps Furiosa hostage, even bringing her to The Citadel to attempt to overtake its warlord, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his army of War Boys. Much later, and now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa plots her escape and revenge against Dementus.

The Mad Max world George Miller created supports different forms of storytelling in each film. Fury Road was propulsive and bombastic while Thunderdome was more localized to one region of the wasteland, and a second that Max discovers after being exiled.

The first sequel, The Road Warrior was more of a vehicular heist movie while the original film was more of a drama than an action movie. Closer to Thunderdome, Furiosa lives in the worlds introduced by Fury Road but it is no less epic.

Because Furiosa is a prequel to Fury Road, fans know that Furiosa ends up with Immortan Joe, shaves her head and loses her arm. Still, those events occur naturally, sometimes incidentally, and never stop the movie to point out the callbacks.

The Citadel and Immortan Joe’s harem of concubines were first seen as Fury Road plowed through them in chase scenes. Here, entire scenes get to play out in those realms.

Furiosa visits the neighboring Gastown and Bullet Farms, who provided armies for Fury Road’s chase but now are settings for plot and action. Dementus’ encampment is a new enclave of the wasteland.

The film introduces awesome new vehicles for chases between Immortan Joe and Dementus’ men, with Furiosa in the middle of it all. But, in a bittersweet irony, the longevity of the Mad Max franchise now means that the current film employs more screen work than its predecessors, which simply didn’t have that luxury.

Perhaps Miller’s imagination finally got bigger than could be built in the real world. There is still real vehicular work, but many sequences appear to use The Volume technology to allow the filmmakers to film in front of backgrounds unfolding on a screen behind them.

Fury Road combined shots and enhanced backgrounds digitally, but a tanker chase in the middle of Furiosa is particularly glaring. It looks like they used Fury Road as the backdrop for the new movie.

Coloring the sky to look more apocalyptic is fine. Putting the sky on a screen behind actors looks far less natural.

The sequence is still full of new contraptions, like parasails and a metal claw like a full size version of a claw machine in an arcade. Miller still uses the camera dynamically in these sequences, judiciously following the assault on a tanker from all sides.

But when it cuts to Taylor-Joy standing on a real outback road, it’s a relief to be back in the real world.

The Citadel was already a digitally enhanced set in Fury Road. Having more stationary dialogue scenes on those sets allows more time to notice the background when characters are chatting on impossibly high catwalks.

There’s still probably more vehicular work than any other Hollywood movie, just less than Mad Max films used to employ. They do drive over a dozen War Boys standing atop a tanker down the desert road.

The final chase looks like they’re really driving on sand dunes, except for closeups but that’s fair to cut to reaction shots. A shootout occurs on an outdoor set.

So these are still Mad Max action sequences created by George Miller, and designed by Guy Norris. They’re playing with more tools than used to be available, and watching War Boys fling themselves off moving vehicles to self-immolate never gets old.

In the score, Junkie XL himself, Tom Holkenborg, employs some of the memorable cues from his Fury Road score for relevant action scenes. But elsewhere, he lets the music be subtle for this film’s dramatic attention.

The world Miller created in 1979 continues to generate worthwhile new stories and engrossing places to explore. With Furiosa as compelling as Max Rockatansky, that world grows even more vast.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.