Aasha (2026) · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)

Dir. Safar Sanal · Starring Urvashi, Aishwarya Lekshmi, Joju George, Vijayaraghavan, Joy Mathew · 127 min · Malayalam

Streaming: ZEE5

*

The setup: Aasha (Urvashi) is a widow who has raised two daughters on her own — Anitha, the elder, and Anagha (Aishwarya Lekshmi) — and she is not an easy woman to live with. She is stubborn, short-tempered and quietly unwell: years of it have left her with insomnia, a raw nervous edge and a habit of suspecting everyone around her. One night, driving home after a second show, their car collides with another vehicle driven by a man named Jeemon (Joju George). What follows is not a straightforward accident claim. Aasha resolves to pursue a case against him; Jeemon makes it plain what pursuing it will cost her. From there the film slides into a chain of decisions, each one slightly worse than the last.

The verdict: a gripping thriller, and a real showcase for its lead. What holds you is how little the film lets up. Safar Sanal keeps the pressure on from the collision onward, and the screenplay keeps handing you new information that rearranges what you thought the previous scene meant. It is a film built on difficult moral ground rather than on a mystery to be solved — the title character is not simply a wronged woman, and Jeemon is not simply a villain, and the film is most alive in the space between those two facts. The running time never drags, which is a real achievement for a film this interior.

The acting is the best thing in it — and it is a genuine lead performance. Urvashi carries the film almost entirely on her own shoulders, and she is extraordinary. Aasha could easily have become a collection of tics — the trembling hands, the sleepless eyes, the sudden flare of temper — and instead she makes all of it feel like one continuous person: a woman who has spent years being the only thing standing between her daughters and the world, and who no longer knows how to put that down. The fear, the guilt, the helplessness and the maternal ferocity all sit in the same face without ever fighting each other. It is the kind of performance that makes you realise how rarely this kind of role is written for an actor this good, at this stage of a career. Aishwarya Lekshmi gives Anagha a steadier, more watchful presence that works as a counterweight to her mother's volatility, and Joju George — who also co-wrote the film — is excellent as Jeemon, playing him with a calm that is far more threatening than any amount of shouting would have been.

The craft does its job without showing off. Madhu Neelakandan's camerawork gives the film a heavy, unsettled texture that matches Aasha's state of mind — interiors that feel too small, night roads that feel too long — and the score from Midhun Mukundan and Govind Vasantha stays low and anxious instead of telling you when to be afraid. Shan Mohammed's edit is patient where it needs to be, which is what allows the screenplay's turns to land as disorienting rather than as cheap.

Where I part company with it — and this is the ending. I wanted it to go somewhere else. The film earns a great deal of goodwill on the way to its final act, and the conclusion it chooses is a defensible one, but it is not the one this story had set me up to want. What makes it sting slightly is that the setup promises a reckoning the film then declines to deliver in full: Aasha's whole arc is about a woman deciding how far she is willing to go, and the film resolves that question with less force than it asked it. That is a matter of taste rather than a defect, and I would rather a film take a swing I disagree with than take no swing at all — but the honest note is that the last stretch is the one part of the film I would happily rewrite. Several critics landed on the same seam: The Times of India, rating it 3.5, felt some turns "may not feel completely convincing," and The Hindu thought the central conflict was on weak footing and the mystery fizzled after its promising start.

The critics otherwise split predictably for a film this performance-driven. The Week, at 4 stars, admired how Urvashi and Joju George flip the familiar good-versus-bad framing. The New Indian Express gave it 3.5 and noted it slows a little in the second half but stays engaging, reading it as a study of how both impulses can live in one person. The Indian Express, at 3, praised the two leads while arguing the script leaned too hard on Urvashi's range and did not flesh out the story around her. Onmanorama put the central tension neatly: the idea is stronger than the execution. Even with that spread, it sits at 7.6 on IMDb across more than two thousand votes, which tells you the performances are doing something the quibbles cannot touch.

Bottom line: Aasha is a great one to put on if you want a thriller that holds you — gripping screenplay, no wasted minutes, and a lead turn from Urvashi that is worth the ticket on its own. It is a genuinely engaging film and it earns almost all of its tension honestly. I just wished for a different ending: the film asks a hard question about how far a mother will go and then answers it more gently than the story deserved. Go for Urvashi, stay for the screenplay, and see if the final stretch lands better for you than it did for me.