CHENNAI — For twenty-four years, the question drifted through South Indian cinema like an old rumor nobody could quite source: when would Jayaram and Urvashi work together again? The two actors, cornerstones of Malayalam comedy in the 1990s and early 2000s, had not shared a full collaborative film since K.S. Ravikumar’s Panchatanthiram in 2002. That drought ended on June 5 when Pandiraj’s Parimala and Co opened across Tamil Nadu, and neither actor arrived in the film the audience expected.
Jayaram plays Parimala, the anxious patriarch of a dysfunctional household. Urvashi is Sudhandhira, his sharp-tongued wife. The family unit is completed by Sandy as their eldest son Varghese, Santosh Sobhan as Chittu, Sanjana Krishnamoorthy as their daughter Parasakthi, and Ananthika Sanilkumar as Madhumitha. The setup is domestic and familiar until it isn’t. When a local criminal who has been harassing Parasakthi turns up dead, every member of the family becomes a suspect, and the comedy shifts into something darker and considerably less comfortable.
Pandiraj, who conceived the story during the COVID-19 lockdown and wrote the screenplay in a single week, described the film as his attempt to strip a whodunit down to a living room. The 138-minute film, shot entirely on location in Palakkad over 45 working days, was produced by Allirajah Subaskaran’s Lyca Productions alongside G.K.M. Tamil Kumaran and Pandiraj himself through Pasanga Productions. Five Star Creations handled distribution.
The reunion carries weight that the box office numbers alone do not communicate. Jayaram and Urvashi defined a particular mode of Malayalam screen comedy across dozens of films through the 1990s, a chemistry built on precise timing and a willingness to let scenes breathe past their scripted endpoints. Panchatanthiram, which paired them within an ensemble that included Kamal Haasan, was the last time they occupied the same frame in a feature film. In the two decades since, both actors worked prolifically but separately, and the gap widened into something that felt less like scheduling and more like an era that had simply closed.
What makes Parimala and Co notable beyond the reunion is the casting of Mysskin as Inspector Emperuman. The actor-filmmaker, known for his own darkly stylized thrillers, plays the investigating officer with a deadpan intensity that several reviewers have called the film’s most reliable anchor. Yogi Babu appears as the family’s landlord, and the supporting cast includes Sendrayan, Singampuli, Bagavathi Perumal, and Poornima Ravi as Gomathi.
George C. Williams handled the cinematography, lending the Palakkad interiors a warmth that contrasts with the murder investigation threading through the second half. FoxN composed the score, and Pradeep E. Ragav edited the film to its final 138-minute runtime, a length that has drawn both praise for its unhurried family sequences and criticism for a third act that some reviewers felt lost its pacing.
The critical response has been genuinely divided. Positive notices highlighted the Jayaram-Urvashi dynamic and Mysskin’s restrained performance, while harsher reviews took aim at the tonal shifts between family comedy and crime thriller. Cinema Express gave the film 1.5 out of 5, calling the blend uneven. The Indian Express was similarly cool at 1 out of 5. Other outlets were considerably warmer, praising Pandiraj’s willingness to build an entire mystery around kitchen-table conversations rather than procedural mechanics.
At the box office, Parimala and Co collected Rs 6.70 crore in its opening weekend across three days, a solid if unspectacular opening for a Tamil film without a conventional star headliner. The number positions it as a mid-range commercial performer, though the film’s legs will depend on whether word-of-mouth from the Jayaram-Urvashi faithful translates into sustained weekday holds.
There is a detail about the production that did not make the promotional materials. Urvashi learned of her brother’s death on the first day of shooting in Palakkad. She chose to continue filming. Pandiraj and the cast only learned about the loss later in the schedule, and Urvashi’s performance across those early scenes carries no visible trace of the grief she was processing off-camera. It is the kind of fact that reframes an entire viewing without changing a single frame.
The film arrives in a week that has been unusually active for Indian cinema, with Bobby Deol’s Bandar generating buzz for its TIFF premiere under Anurag Kashyap’s direction, and Samantha Ruth Prabhu confirming her return to Telugu cinema with Maa Inti Bangaaram. For Jayaram and Urvashi, the question is no longer whether they can still work together. It is why it took this long.
Pandiraj has spoken about wanting to make a film that felt like eavesdropping on a real family, and the choice to set the entire story within the confines of one household in Palakkad reflects that ambition. Whether the execution satisfies audiences who remember what Jayaram and Urvashi could do together at their peak remains the open question. South Indian cinema’s appetite for legacy reunions shows no sign of fading, but nostalgia has never been a guarantee of quality, and Parimala and Co does not pretend otherwise.
