‘Members of the Problematic Family’ movie review: R Gowtham’s explosive Tamil funeral drama

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Tamil indie’s bold new voice R Gowtham’s debut film, which premiered in the Forum sidebar of Berlinale 2026, is an unorthodox, audacious, rare family drama

Updated - July 17, 2026 12:36 pm IST

As R Gowtham’s debut feature rolls out, you wonder if you are in another Ee.Ma.Yau. (Lijo Jose Pelliserry) or Shavam (Don Palathara) ride. Here is yet another funeral film, but unlike anything one has seen before. Gowtham’s Tamil roller-coaster family-drama, Members of the Problematic Family (Sikkalana Kudumbathin Uruppinarhal), goes all Paul Thomas Anderson in Chennai’s Red Hills suburbs.

Gowtham’s film — which was at the NFDC Film Bazaar Viewing Room last year, produced by him and his friends at Labyrinth Narratives and another friend’s outfit Potato Eaters Collective — just premiered in the Forum segment of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival. It is the fourth Tamil film to screen in this segment, after Mani Ratnam’s Alaipayuthey (2001), Ameer’s Paruthiveeran (2008) and PS Vinothraj’s Kottukkaali (2024).

Members of the Problematic Family defies definitions, formal straitjacketing and even cinematic structure. Gowtham throws the plot out of the window. The cultural setting is familiar, but the filmmaker surprises you by sewing images and eking out a singularly riveting non-linear narrative. Raw, absurd, and with a wild energy bubbling over, the film will shock you in every aspect. It upends previously held notions of cinematic formalism. Here is a self-assured debut that unfolds backwards, from a funeral and into a character study of Prabha (A. Ra. Ajith Kumar) and through him, of others, each character wretched in their own way.

This is also a mother-son story, an upending of the Oedipal complex, of Shanthi and Prabha. One is as busy, running the household round-the-clock, as the wayward other whiles away his time and seeks her attention and lost love for him. Their outbursts and frustrations boomerang off each other. It perhaps draws from one phrase Nietzsche wrote in his Wahnbriefe (“madness letters”), before his death, after his mental collapse to his mother: “Mutter, ich bin dumm (Mom, I am a fool).” That fragile psychological state Prabha embodies, but he couldn’t say those words to his own mother. Prabha is an alcoholic, but his needs are not illogical.

Structurally, this film is like a novella. Divided into four incomplete chapters — with Wes Anderson-like titles — the film begins with Prabha’s funeral and ends with his final dream. Gowtham eschews the Aristotelian structure, avoids action and reaction, and instead shows fragments. Each character is incomplete and doubtful.

After Berlinale, ‘Members of the Problematic Family’ to premiere at Indian Film Festival of Melbourne 2026

The fiction feature looks like a documentary, with electrifying acting by its ensemble cast, most of whom are non-actors, besides two: the uncle Sellam, here played by Karuththadaiyaan, who was the father in P.S. Vinothraj’s IFFR Rotterdam Tiger Award-winning Koozhangal (Pebbles, 2021), and Ajith, who is from a theatre background. An opprobrious court jester, Prabha shows us the reality of our world hidden beneath masks of civility. More than alcoholism and portrayal of a dysfunctional family, the film is also about a man-child, misunderstood, emotionally and mentally trapped. Gowtham’s film scratches at a festering wound but from a healthy distance. Characters are liberated from both judgment and empathy.

Shot in a very cinéma-vérité style, the film is personal and lived in as it is poignantly observational. It lays out the micro- and macro-dynamics of Prabha’s place in his family and the family’s place (especially the mother and son’s) in this society. Through the tropes of alcoholism, family dysfunctionality, familial physical violence, trauma and mental distress, it delivers a masterpiece. Prabha’s close ones don’t shed a tear at the funeral. That performativity is eschewed. The 16-day-long funeral is a ritualistic affair that culminates in a feast. The extended family goes through the motions. Grief comes to them later — in brief moments of regret and even suppressed love. Tears roll down the mother’s cheeks when she looks at the decapitated head of a goat amid her laundry.