Never Ending Movie Carnival
Never Ending Movie Carnival
Starfish movie review: beautifully shot moving and probing shades of love and life
What: Starfish - Khushalii Kumar, Ehan Bhat and Milind Soman starring romantic thriller lives on its moments that depicts different shades of love, life and more.
Starfish movie synopsis
Set in the picturesque location of Malta in Mediterranean. Starfish adapted from Bina Nayak's best-selling novel Starfish Pickle is the story of Tara (Khushalii Kumar) a skilled commercial diver fighting her childhood trauma, societal norms and complex relationships.
The movie sees her journey as a child from a broken family to a free willing young girl who is constantly haunted by her past, her encounters with different individuals, her search for love and compassion and ends up as coming of age story of a woman.
Adapting a novel like Starfish Pickle by Bina Nayak that has layers of human traits and gets further deeper in its journey that massages the readers soul is a tough nut to crack it in two hours.
Writer director Akhilesh Jaiswal (writer - Gangs of Wasseypur, Ugly, director – Mastram) with his co-writer Aditya Bhatnagar while adapting the novel into a screenplay place the dots rightly but novel with extra layers need some unexpected magic that touches our soul.
That doesn’t mean that Starfish misses the heart beat completely, it does has those moments that makes it reach our heart at intervals but it’s not an overwhelmingly sweeping feeling.
A genre hoper, Starfish swings from a psychological drama to a romantic thriller with subtle dark tones but it’s actually a twisted coming of age in the end.
So, when the populist mainstream elements are concerned - romance, trauma, Starfish scores but when it gets deeper into Khushali’s identity crises and the Goa episode, the movie just floats on the surface instead of taking a deep dive and fails to touch our souls. It had that potential.
Overall, it’s a decent attempt if we look it as a mainstream film on human drama and not go deep into the marvellous potential the plot had.
The movie is beautifully shot and Malta looks gorgeous in this movie.
Performance
Khushalii Kumar shines in the complex character of Tara, after impressing in Dhoka, the actress displays her ability to carry a film having her as the protagonist. More nuances on dialogue delivery will make her a much better actress.
Ehan Bhat as the singer and lover of Khushalii is good.
Tusharr Khanna making his big screen debut is decent.
Milind Soman as the musician/guru is good.
God support comes from Vidya Malvade, Jagat Rawat and Nikhat Khan.
Final words
Starfish is not your run of the mill mainstream love and relationship drama, its about love and relationship but its more about life and people and their changing circumstances in changing times. Starfish somewhere manages to touch your heart if you have an appetite for a different coming of age story of love and life.
Going with an extra for the effort and beautiful locales
A child born from life & fed by cinema. A filmi keeda from child & a film journalist for the last fifteen years. a father, seeker, foodie who loves crooning bollywood melodies twitter.com/cineblues More By vishal verma