Youth Movie Review: A cover version of a cover version of a high school film

Youth Movie Synopsis: A teen entering 12th standard decides finding love matters more than academics, and stumbles through crushes, fights, and family drama along the way.Youth Movie Review: For his directorial debut, Ken Karunas has written himself the kind of role where girls confess their love unprompted, boys start fights over him in corridors, and a loyal group of friends gathers around purely to witness his life unfold, all of it wrapped in every high school comedy cliche the genre has been recycling for two decades. Set in the 2014-16 period, Youth follows Praveen (Ken Karunas) from his 10th board results, which he barely scrapes through, to a string of crushes and breakups that feel cheesy and forced.The school stretches play out like a rotation of pre-loaded scenarios. Preshika (Meenakshi Dinesh) warns Praveen to stay away because her dad's a cop, only to confess she likes him anyway. While she's away, Sonal (Priyadarshni Yadav) sends a friend request and shows up at the canteen to declare her feelings, which turns out to be a revenge scheme cooked up by her and her friends to sabotage Praveen's relationship. His next crush, Kanagavalli (Anishma Anilkumar), takes up significant space in the second half, but by this point the film has cycled through so many romantic interests that each new one registers with diminishing returns. The romantic threads are so interchangeable that swapping the girls between scenarios would change nothing about the film.At home, every character runs on a single setting. Dad (Suraj Venjaramoodu) owns a small bakery and has written his son off. Mom (Devadarshini) is apprehension cranked to maximum, superstitious, overbearing, convinced her son will crack IAS despite all evidence to the contrary. These are template characters given template arcs, and when a scuffle at school gets Praveen and a bunch of boys handed TCs, mom's public humiliation in front of the other parents triggers a mild heart attack that sends the film into serious, emotive territory. The second half leans harder into the family drama from here, and while the balance between the lighter and heavier stretches mostly holds, every beat in that emotional track feels like the bleeding-heart stuff you've seen a hundred times before.Visually, the film has no character of its own, the kind of flat, indistinct look that blends into every other comedy-drama in the same budget bracket. G.V. Prakash's score sounds like it was assembled from his own back catalogue. The material is so thoroughly watered down, cover versions of cover versions of jokes and situations that have been doing the rounds for ages, that you barely taste any flavour by the end.To his credit, Ken Karunas has designed some comedic set pieces that draw laughs, and the boys around Praveen share a chemistry that keeps their scenes from feeling entirely disposable. Suraj Venjaramoodu lands a few dry comic moments of his own. Given how easy it is for this territory to collapse into unwatchable cliche, Youth stays on the right side of that line for most of its runtime. It could have used twenty fewer minutes, though, and nothing of value would have been lost.Written by: Abhinav Subramanian