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3 min readFeb 13, 2026 09:19 AM IST
Tu Yaa Main movie review: Tu Yaa Main is a Gen Z coded disaster movie which revolves around two characters who may live in the same city, but inhabit wildly different universes.
Maruti Kadam is desperate to escape his crowded life in a Mumbai chawl. Avni Shah is a poor little rich SoBo girl, whose fancy mansion can’t contain her sadness. His mum sells farsaan for a living. She is a ‘matcha girl for life’. He is chalk. She is very expensive cheese.
Tu Yaa Main is a Gen Z coded disaster movie which revolves around two characters who may live in the same city, but inhabit wildly different universes, their only conduit to each other being their Instagram (or whatever they are calling it here, because, duh, you can’t call things by their real names) handles, where they can slide into each other’s DMs, before diving into a relationship. Or is it just a situationship?
Both use their digital avatars to escape their reality: Miss Vanity (Shanaya Kapoor) has millions of followers by virtue of possessing her own personal swimming pool; Ala Flowpara From Nalasopara (Adarsh Gourav) want to rap his way out of having to fight for drinking water fetched in daily by tankers.
Water as an element flows right through Bejoy Nambiar’s strikingly shot film (adapted from the 2018 Thai film The Pool), which faithfully follows the disaster movie template, where everything sunny happens in the first half, and the second plunges into a miasma of fear, with a pool turning into a space where the two fight for their lives, as they try to keep killer crocodiles at bay.
Much of the first half feels like we’ve seen it before, and we have, in Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy: Adarsh Gourav stays watchable even if his character’s outlines are familiar, but, with just two films in, Shanaya Kapoor faces the real danger– even more dangerous than scaly reptiles– of being typecast into ‘a rich girl running away from her problems’. A couple of scenes– one shot in a tub where the two are a tangle of limbs and slight, very slight, sexual frisson– are interesting; the rest is eye-glaze. A walk-on appearance by the lovely Parvathy makes you sit up, but she’s gone all too soon.
The second half is where the film gets into its pulpy stride, or should I say stroke, and I have to say that the crocodiles may be fake, but they feel feral. The stakes are suitably high, and the willingness to sacrifice characters and creatures to the prowling predators gets us to the edge-of-the-seat: you know exactly what’s going to happen when a character arrives by himself at a deserted guest-house, and you still feel the jump scare.
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My tip: Skip the first half, and check into this survival drama just in time for the crocs and the chaos in order to clutch your Valentine. If you feel the need to.
Tu Yaa Main movie cast: Adarsh Gourav, Shanaya Kapoor, Parvathy
Tu Yaa Main movie director: Bejoy Nambiar
Tu Yaa Main movie rating: 2 stars
English (US) ·