Medium Spicy review: This unfamiliar dish with an unusual combination of ingredients is quite delicious

Lalit Prabhakar and Sai Tamhankar's Medium Spicy is about a 32-year-old named Nissim who belongs to a typical middle-class Maharashtrian family. Nissim works as a chef at a five-star restaurant and has recently been offered the opportunity to move to Paris as an executive chef.

While everything looks hunky-dory in Nissim's life, it is not. On the personal front he is submerged in loneliness and at the end of his ability to endure unhappiness. His colleague and friend Shubhankar (Sagar Deshmukh) is the only person with whom he can vent his frustration. His mother (Neena Kulkarni) wants him to get married as soon as possible while his father (Ravindra Mankani) spends most of his time reading.

Nissim is unsure of the idea of being in a relationship because he is surrounded by relationships of all shapes and colours and each looks like more work than play. He has two options — his boss and chef Gowri (Tamhankar) and a young woman named Prajakta (Parna Pethe). Gowri hails from a South Indian town and has just been through a messy break-up. She is quite upfront and blunt whereas Prajakta is shy and meek. Nissim forms good friendships with both. But can he take either relationship to the next level? And how?

The film, however, is not just about this love triangle. It explores many other themes such as loneliness and the sacrifices one has to make to be in a relationship. It helped that I went in blind. It was like an unfamiliar dish that you have never heard of and are reluctant to try, but which shocks your taste buds with its deliciousness despite the strange combination of ingredients. The film is part existential drama, part romance, part family drama, but director Mohit Takalkar somehow mixes these ingredients together well without letting any lose their original taste.

As the title suggests, everything here is medium spicy. Takalkar makes sure to keep the proceedings devoid of excessive melodrama. The characters go through heartbreak, feel sad, even depressed to an extent, some are not on talking terms with each other for decades, but there is never a hue and cry about it. It's just part and parcel of life.

While the film does not have any big moments, there are a number of scenes that are both fascinating and moving. The film also tries to open up some philosophical territories but never completely goes into them, which is just as well because it does not have room to explore those portions.

There are a few subplots and characters that could have been given more importance. Pethe's Prajakta is one example. Prajakta is a young woman who seems to have a crush on Nissim. He reciprocates her feelings. But the character and the plot involving her feel undercooked. Surrounded as it is by other mouthwatering dishes, the underdone nature of this dish becomes more apparent.

Likewise, the subplot involving Sagar Deshmukh's character is severely underused. The actor, however, does a fine job and makes up for the lack of depth in the character.

Another thing that might not work in the film's favour is the world these characters inhabit. Few ordinary people can relate with this world. Their financial condition is good, they live in relative luxury and don't seem to have any struggles save for their strained relationships.

Lalit Prabhakar is almost in every scene in the film and the actor doesn't put a foot wrong even once. There are several scenes that required him to bring his A game to the table and he does so. He also brings the right amount of coldness and passiveness to his character without coming across as a total jerk. He easily handles this complex aspect of the character.

Sai Tamhankar is on a dream run. After Pondicherry (2022), SonyLIV's web-series Pet Puraan (2022) and the YouTube web-series B.E. Rojgaar (2022), she is seen yet again in a different avatar. Each of her characters in the projects mentioned has been vastly different from the others. And once again Tamhankar does justice to her complicated character here. She has to speak Marathi with a slight South Indian accent, but it never comes across as fake. Her character is also going through some emotional termoil and is quite lonely.

The rest of the cast, including Kulkarni, Pethe and Mankani, perform their roles with the competence one expects of them.

The film is aesthetically pleasing and scores high marks in the technical aspects, especially production design and cinematography. I also loved the way some of those important interaction scenes were staged. The camera moves smoothly in an unobstrusive manner during multiple tender interaction scenes. There is nothing fussy or overdone in the film's look, nothing to distract the viewer from the plot unfolding before her eyes. Human interaction is the main event here.

Medium Spicy is running in theatres across Maharashtra now,