There is a scene early in "Chiram" where Seetha plays back her first recording and hears only mistake - a cough, a passing truck, an off-key refrain. She deletes it. Later in the film, she has learned to leave those imperfections in. That arc, from erasure to acceptance, is the whole movie in miniature, and Paradayil trusts it enough to let it breathe across nearly two and a half hours.
Koroth is the film's anchor and its revelation. She plays Seetha without vanity, letting the character be prickly, self-absorbed, occasionally unlikable, and then slowly softening without ever announcing the softening. The performance is all small adjustments - the way she holds her recorder, the way she stops finishing sentences. Anoop Menon's turn is more restrained, sometimes too restrained; his character's interiority stays frustratingly out of reach, and the romance between them flickers where it should burn.
What works best is the texture. Paradayil and her crew render Santiniketan with an unshowy affection, avoiding both postcard prettiness and poverty tourism. The film never treats Baul music as exotic backdrop; it sits inside the music, letting melodies run long past the point where another director might cut. Cinematography leans into natural light and long lenses, and the sound design is the film's unsung hero - layered, intimate, alive.
Where "Chiram" falters is its second act, which loses momentum in a stretch of repetitive academic scenes that gesture at conflict without generating it. A subplot involving a bureaucratic threat to the university's funding never fully coheres, and a late confrontation between Seetha and Murali's character feels unearned given how little we've seen of their friction. The film also resists resolution a little too aggressively; by the final scene, we're left holding an ambiguity that feels less profound than merely unfinished.
That said, the good outweighs the uneven. "Chiram" is a film of genuine feeling, made by people who clearly respect both the music at its center and the audience watching it. It is not perfect. But it lingers.
