Balan: The Boy

Their recent works have been widely appreciated, naturally raising expectations for the film.

Soon, she finds a roof beneath her head for the two of them when she comes to work for a wheelchair-bound old woman (a terrific performance from Dolly June).

So much so that when Balan veers away from this equation, you can sense a struggle in both pacing and writing to match what is an excellent first half, even if the film eventually wraps things up with a surprising conclusion.

Until the plot development that ties together the boy, police inspector Pavithran (Jean Paul Lal) and the thief Abbas (Tovino Thomas), Balan The Boy is a suspenseful, gripping, plausible and often moving character study.