‘Mughizh’ movie review: This Vijay Sethupathi-starrer is a bittersweet exploration of love, loss and grief

Directed by Karthik Swaminathan, ‘Mughizh’ brims with warmth and is strictly for all the dog lovers and their cohorts whom you usually spot at the beach on a Sunday morning

They say that no love is more pure than a dog’s. It is this belief that Mughizh, an hour-long short film starring Vijay Sethupathi, Regina Cassandra and Sreeja Vijay Sethupathi, subscribes to by and large. But unlike your regular children’s films where the animal is either used as a prop or written unnecessarily into the film to accentuate melodrama, everything in Mughizh is so gentle that it makes you overlook the plainness of its storytelling. Its gentleness, perhaps, can be attributed to the short looking more like a family rummaging through old photographs and memories that come along, than having attributes of a film.

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And that is done with careful precision to not end up looking like a giant ball of pretence. For starters, it helps that the short has a cute, little pup at the centre, Scooby, who is the actual ‘star’ of the film. But it is not entirely about Scooby. Again, unlike your regular children’s films, Karthik Swaminathan isn’t dealing with a film about love; it is the opposite end of the spectrum: grief.