Rating: 3/5

Cast: Anaswara Rajan, Mamita Baiju, Arjun Ashokan, Naslen Gafoor

In Super Sharanya, which is made by the same team as Thaneer Mathan Dinangal (a superhit movie), the entire setup gets upgraded. School becomes engineering college in Super Sharanya and instead of a male lead, we get a female lead. But Super Sharanya doesn’t live up to the standards set by Thaneer Mathan Dinangal.

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If we refrain from any comparison with Thaneer Mathan Dinangal, Super Sharanya is a delightful watch which, however, doesn’t stay with us for long.

The movie focuses on the female lead, Sharanya who is an attractive young girl, which directly implies that she is pestered by several men around her. But the strength of the film lies in how it doesn’t make her a damsel in distress and opts for a humorous approach here. There’s Ajith Menon, a caricature version of Arjun Reddy, who is a senior in Sharanya’s college and keeps bothering her with his proposal to marry her. Her classmate, Sangeeth (played by the hilarious Naslen K Gafoor) also seems to take a liking for Sharanya but never really bothers her with that. The creepiest of all is her professor who proposes to her during her viva and takes revenge on her for the rejection by intentionally failing her for the exams.

In spite of all this, the mood of the film doesn’t get unpleasant or intense. With the right amount of humor, the movie keeps us engaged throughout the first half. The girls’ hostel scenes feel very relatable and don’t go overboard with unrealistic portrayals. The friendships, the fights, the bonding all feel luminous. So are the canteen scenes. An extra effort seems to be given to making these bits as relatable as possible.

Where Super Sharanya falters is when her love life begins. It doesn’t really offer Sharanya much value, or so I felt. No, Deepu wasn’t a toxic masculine guy, but he just doesn’t add anything to her life (except extra 30-45 minutes to the film!). The romance just keeps floating, without properly landing anywhere. With a little more grip on this segment of the script, the film could have been crisper. Some exciting cameos help in eradicating a pinch of boredom.

Anaswara Rajan is delightful as Sharanya. If there’s anyone who steals the show after Anaswara, it would be Mamitha Baiju as Sona. She pulls off the humor brilliantly keeping her body language and expressions on point. Naslen deserved a little more screen time.

The film is called Super Sharanya, as that is the female lead’s nickname. But we are never made aware of the reason for this nickname. Sharanya is shown as a naïve, underconfident girl in the beginning, but this doesn’t really change much towards the end, making me doubt if it would be fair enough to tag the film as a ‘coming-of-age-drama’. The character detailing is one of the best parts of the film. Every character, main or supporting, has something worth noticing.

Though 160 minutes may seem a little stretched, Super Sharanya would manage to serve as a good weekend watch.

Image Courtesy: YouTube