With Love Movie Review: A Charming Rom-Com Dive

The plot is elegantly simple. Sathya (Abishan Jeevinth), a young man drifting through life with a well-meaning but meddlesome family, is strong-armed into a blind date arranged by his sister (RJ Ananthi). The setup feels like a scene we’ve seen a hundred times - the reluctant hero, the "just one coffee" promise - but the film pivots quickly. At the café, he meets Monisha (Anaswara Rajan), a woman who is direct, slightly guarded, and refreshingly unimpressed by the awkward small talk. Then, a casual question reveals the twist: they both attended the same school in Ooty, years apart in batch but connected by the same corridors, the same teachers, and a shared crush on the same senior. What follows isn’t a madcap chase or a series of confusions. Instead, the film lets them spend the next few days walking through old neighborhoods, flipping through a dusty yearbook, and trading stories about a classmate named “One-Drop Kumar” who fainted during the school play. Their bond tightens not through drama, but through the slow, deliberate process of rebuilding a shared history.

Madhan’s direction is patient to a fault. He trusts the audience to fall in love with these characters the same way they fall for each other - through quiet observation. The first hour is a masterclass in low-stakes charm. The screenplay lingers on scenes that most films would cut: Sathya and Monisha sitting on a park bench, arguing about whether a particular teacher’s mustache was real or drawn on, or the way Monisha’s laugh cracks when she remembers her own embarrassing school-day confession. Abishan Jeevinth plays Sathya with a gentle slackness, a man who has never been the protagonist of his own life, slowly waking up. Anaswara Rajan, meanwhile, brings a flicker of vulnerability beneath Monisha’s confident exterior. You can see the moment she lets her guard down - not with a speech, but with the way her shoulders drop when he remembers the name of her childhood dog.

The supporting cast is a mixed bag. Harish Kumar, playing Sathya’s friend Dinesh, delivers most of the comedy, but his character feels a little too close to the stock "horny wingman" archetype. Kavya Anil as Anisha, Monisha’s friend, gets one genuinely funny scene about a disastrous online date but is otherwise underused. The real standout is Theni Murugan as Sathya’s father, a man who communicates entirely through grunts and pointed silences, yet manages to steal the film’s most touching moment - a simple scene where he hands his son an old, dusty box of letters, saying, "Your mother wrote me one letter. That’s all it took."

The cinematography by the uncredited DOP (not in provided metadata) is restrained, using natural light and medium shots that keep the focus on the actors’ faces. The music, however, is a slight letdown. The background score swells too predictably during the "memory montage" sequences, and the single romantic ballad feels like it was borrowed from a 2015 Imtiaz Ali film. But the dialogue, especially in Tamil, has a lived-in texture. The characters speak in the casual, half-finished sentences of real people. When Monisha tells Sathya, "You know, I hated you on that first date," she pauses, then adds, "But I also hated the coffee, so it might not be personal." It’s that lightness that carries the film.

The problem is the second half. Around the 80-minute mark, the film introduces a conflict that feels engineered rather than organic. Sathya’s job transfer to Mumbai is brought up, and Monisha’s fear of long-distance relationships surfaces. It’s a perfectly reasonable obstacle, but the film spends too long having them argue about it in the same café where they first met, rehashing the same points. The pacing slackens, and you can feel the runtime stretching. The climax, which involves a rain-soaked declaration at the school’s old auditorium, is charming but feels like a checklist item.

Pros

• Abishan Jeevinth and Anaswara Rajan have effortless, natural chemistry
• The nostalgia-driven first half is warm, witty, and emotionally precise
• The dialogue feels authentic, avoiding artificial "romantic" lines
• Supporting performances from Theni Murugan and RJ Ananthi add emotional weight
• The film respects its own premise - no unnecessary subplots or villain characters

Cons

• The middle act drags, trapped in a repetitive argument cycle
• The music score is generic and overused in emotional scenes
• Some comic relief characters (Harish Kumar’s Dinesh, Sacchin Nachiappan’s Balaji) feel like leftovers from a broader comedy
• The third-act conflict arrives too late and resolves too neatly

With Love is not the most innovative or exciting Tamil romantic comedy of the year, but it is one of the most sincere. It understands that love, in its most durable form, is not about grand gestures but about the accumulation of small, shared moments - a forgotten nickname, the exact shade of the school uniform, a hill station’s cold breeze that smells of eucalyptus and chalk dust. The film stumbles in its second half, leaning on a conflict that feels borrowed from a dozen other movies, and its soundtrack lacks the ambition to elevate the material. Yet the core relationship works so beautifully that you forgive the lulls. Abishan Jeevinth and Anaswara Rajan do not just act in love; they listen to each other, and that is a rare gift in a genre that often mistakes shouting for passion. Its TMDb rating of 6.737/10 feels about right - a film that is good, sometimes very good, but not quite great. But if you are in the mood for something gentle, a film that feels like a long conversation with an old friend, With Love is worth your time. Sometimes, a warm hug is exactly enough.