The first visual of Mudhal Nee Mudivum Nee (2021), written, directed, and composed by Darbuka Siva, is of a group of boys, all aged about  fifteen, looking for the names of newly admitted girls in their school in the name list. It is a very simple and direct visual. It just has the boys in the frame and two adults walking behind them. To bring about the notion of nostalgia the visual employs very warm and subtle colors. The cinematographer-editor duo, Sujith Sarang and Sreejith Sarang, had done this before in Shree Karthick's short film Childhood Diaries (2020). It, indeed, added flavor to Shree Karthick's spotless narration in there. But this time around, Siva's leisurely writing does not cooperate.

The film's title is straight out of Siva's own track Maruvaarthai Pesathey which featured in Gautham Vasudev Menon's Enai Nokki Paayum Thotta (2019). There is, however, not a lot of derivation from the title except for the fact that the film features a song with The same name. It stars Kishen Das (as Vinoth), Meetha Raghunath (as Rekha), Harish Kumar (as Chinese), and Amritha Mandarine (as Anu) among many others. There isn't a storyline, as such, in Mudhal Nee Mudivum Nee It is just the high school life of a group of people, and what they had become a few years later. Due to a very leisurely writing of nostalgic events, the whole film looks like an amalgamation of random events with the characters in place. Siva happens to want to make the viewer feel nostalgic. His ideas, however, do not get a concrete structure. Take the example of four consequence scenes. One, in which the students are given a lecture by the principal on sex education. There is some continuity in the next scene where the boys gang discusses the lecture with their adult friend, the owner of a cassette shop. In another scene where the boys watch porn at the house of one of them, they end up stopping it halfway at the arrival of the boy's mother. The boy, however, is caught alone by his mother. The problem is that we do not know why the scene had to exist as the event does not go through any progression. That said, there are many such instances. Siva's objective to make a film that connects with the audience seems like it ends with his own mind. What drives the film, thankfully, is the presence of new yet charismatic actors throughout the first half. All the actors, who are evidently from the film's timeline, become schoolchildren when they have to. The most interesting ones, however, are Vinoth and Chinese. Chinese tries and brings laughter a couple of times with his mischievous being. His transformation into an adult is the part that is most likely to connect well with the audience. He grows to become a bothered adult from a reckless teenager. We also have a plain romantic track between Vinoth and Rekha, who separate on their farewell day due to trust issues. The only scene that Siva seems to have invested a lot in is the one when the three friends, Chinese, Rekha, and Anu, surprise Vinoth on his birthday. It has, relatively, got some more life to it. The separation of Vinoth and Rekha, however, does not have any impact due to a lot of disturbances in the very farewell scene where we witness every character going through a trouble or a transition. As a result or too much crowding, the essential scene feels clumsy robbing it of the ability to convey a message clearly For instance, we have a character named Catherine facing a sexual abuse in the farewell by a worker in the school. There is, unfortunately, no reason as to why she was done so in the story. It is left parboiled, much like the whole film. Later, there is a random play of the cupid myth that advises Vinoth to apologize to Rekha and go back to her. For we do not know the intensity of their relationship, we do not even empathize with the state of Vinoth. The only factor that I happened to empathize with is the state of Sidharth, Rekha's fiancée, who, accidentally happened to join her for the reunion with her school friends a few years later. Sidharth says to Rekha that he finds the reunion boring and lame. One more part that connected well with me. for I was in a similar zone watching Siva's Mudhal Nee Mudivum Nee, that with one definite objective would have made a delightful drama.