CAST: Janhvi Kapoor, Sunny Kaushal, Manoj Pahwa, Sanjay Suri,

DIRECTED BY: Mathukutty Xavier

Mili is a survival thriller starring Janhvi Kapoor in the titular role of an aspiring nurse who wants to immigrate to Canada to help her father take care of his debts.

While she is taking her English language qualifying exams, she has a job at a local Dehradun fast food joint which keeps the money coming. Situated in a mall, this fast food joint has a really nasty manager who nitpicks on everyone since his own wife doesn’t want to consummate their marriage.

Mili is dating Sameer and has not revealed that to her father ( Manoj Pahwa) yet because Sameer does not have a job.

Sameer is also from a different caste than her and she is aware of those differences.

Sameer is offered a job in Delhi and has to leave Doon to work in the capital. A day before he is supposed to leave, Mili and Sameer get pulled up by the beat cops, one of whom turns vile towards Sameer as he realizes that both have different castes and calls Mili’s dad over to the law enforcement offices. Mili’s dad does not speak the next day.

Mili stays back late at work as she is ashamed of facing her dad. Her boyfriend leaves for Delhi without meeting with her. As she punches herself out of work, two of her co-workers bully her into stacking some boxes into the deep freeze. As she is lining the boxes inside, the manager locks her in the freezer. With her phone left outside, she gets locked into the Freezer for the night with everyone clueless about her whereabouts.

One hour into the movie, the survival saga kicks in. And we are twiddling our thumbs because there is no FF button to move the story along to the moot.

Well, that’s how the first half transpired.

The survival movies based on true stories can offer harrowing examples of people performing extraordinary feats in the most desperate of circumstances, but those films are few and far between. Survival films often depict what really happened to people whose life is told in a story that could be inspirational or end in disaster.

Jahnvi Kapoor turns in a credible performance but seems to be let down by an unnecessarily drawn out script and out of place reactions.

Between the scenes of her survival story are orchestrated music and song scores that slow down the story dreadfully. The editing between the scenes inside the freezer and her father’s attempts to track her down are not stitched well together.

The time for the movie is too long at 2:30 hours and could have been a better orchestrated story to tell in an hour less.

Sanjay Suri walks in the second half. Sunny Kaushal does not have much to do. It is a Manoj Pahwa – Janhvi Kapoor movie all the way.

The storage temperature going down through the hours is a bit of an overkill. No restaurant can store their frozen food at variable temperature. It is maintained at a certain temperature in the cold storage to prevent it from going bad. Lower temperatures make the food inedible.

In the final scene when they find an almost hypothermic Mili in the freezer, there is literally a scene of 3 minutes or more embellished with a song, where they do not call the ambulance or even try to get her out of the freezer to safety.

The audience in the theater definitely let out a groan at that.

On the whole, watch it once but despite Jhanvi’s performance, the movie lacks so much.