Dhanush’s NEEK (Nilavuku Enmel Ennadi Kobam) is, as the tagline suggests, a very usual love story. Which is to say, it’s about young people falling in love, misunderstanding each other, and learning something about themselves in the process. The question is not whether we’ve seen this before. We have, many times. The real question is whether the film makes it feel like something worth watching again.

And, for the most part, it does.

Dhanush’s third directorial effort doesn’t really come in with a lot of noise. It’s not a film that’s trying to announce itself with grand statements. The whole thing just kind of plays out in front of you, and you either go with it or you don’t. The film works with a lot of restraint. Not the kind where you feel like the director is overthinking every moment, but the kind that feels instinctive. It’s like Dhanush just trusts his material enough to let it breathe. Unlike Raayan, which leaned into heightened drama, NEEK moves with a sort of casual looseness. The young ensemble, who drink in every third scene because that’s just what they do, move through a world that feels immediate, contemporary, and lived-in.

But NEEK isn’t meandering or unfocused. It’s sharp. The conversations feel completely unpolished in the best way possible, with Tamil and English switching back and forth like how people actually talk. Some movies try way too hard to make this kind of thing sound ‘natural,’ and you can always tell. But here, it just works. The best moments come out of this—the way relationships unfold and how friendships hold space for grief and laughter at the same time.

This is, in many ways, a deceptively simple film. The cinematography does its job without ever trying to be flashy. The music by G.V. Prakash is vibrant without overpowering the film. And then, for a brief moment, NEEK steps away from its whole realism thing and does something spectacular. The Pulla song sequence is honestly great. I loved it. And I liked that the movie, at least here, decided to embrace the big screen for what it is. G.V. Prakash not only composes one of the film’s best tracks but also appears on screen, and for those few minutes, the film completely gives in. The lighting, the staging, the visual rhythm – it’s all just electric. And yeah, maybe it doesn’t fully belong in the movie’s otherwise stripped-down world, but who cares? It works. It’s the one sequence that really leans into the magic of the big screen, and I was happy it was there.

And then, there’s the breakup scene.

This is where I felt like the movie kind of lost me for a bit. It arrives with the force of an old cliché: a misunderstanding that escalates far beyond what seems reasonable in an era where people have about ten different ways to text each other. This is the kind of plot twist that worked in the 80s or 90s, but now? Not so much. Raayan had a similar thing, a narrative shortcut from the 80s, and I remember feeling the same way about it. Dhanush, for all his restraint, still seems drawn to the kind of emotional twists that belong to an older era of Tamil cinema. In a film that otherwise sticks so hard to realism, this moment sticks out. Not because it’s badly done. The actors do their part, some better than others. But it’s a contrivance the movie didn’t need.

Still, NEEK is engaging. And there are moments where you just can’t help but appreciate what Dhanush is doing here. Take the scene at the beach, where a gang of rowdies tries to rob the group and harass the women. Believe me, I wanted the film to use this moment. I wanted the hero to rise up, to tap into something primal, to own this scene. I wanted a Run-style transformation, or even better, a Baasha moment—one punch sending a guy flying, the whole audience losing their minds. Any self-respecting Tamil movie fan would have expected it. But nope. Dhanush doesn’t give you that. Instead of a grand, slow-motion sequence, we get one quick punch, and then the hero just runs. I won’t lie—I felt a little cheated in that moment. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s the whole point. This is a movie that’s refusing to bend to convention. And honestly? That’s kind of cool.

Some performances stand out more than others. Priya Varrier and Ramya Ranganathan are great. Their characters feel textured and real in a way that makes them easy to connect with. Some of the others? Not so much. There are moments where the acting slips, and you suddenly become aware that you’re watching actors act. That’s not always a deal-breaker, but in a film like this, where so much depends on immersion, it’s noticeable. The weeping scene, in particular, completely took me out of the movie. Instead of feeling the heartbreak, I found myself thinking, yeah, that’s an actor trying really hard to cry.

For all its restraint, NEEK still fits into a very familiar formula. But Dhanush’s approach makes a difference. The film isn’t trying to be a grand, sweeping romance. It’s not trying to redefine the genre. It just wants to be a story about a group of people, in a particular moment, feeling things that, to them, seem huge.

In a genre that so often amplifies emotion, NEEK instead asks: What if we just sit with it?