Not one word.

Vaayai Moodi Pesavum (2014) is by turns a sweet romantic comedy and an absurdist farce.  It's a movie about the importance of honest communication, of always speaking from the heart, and it uses a sudden outbreak of a disease that renders its victims literally speechless as its central metaphor.  It works. it works well, even, but watching it in the year 2021 makes for some surreal moments.

Aravind (Dulquer Salmaan) is a good-hearted door to door glue salesman in the hill city of Panimalai. He is an incredible talker, and he uses this talent not just to sell glue, but to make people's lives better.  As he tells a client, when he sees that something is broken, he can't help but try to fix it.  Still, there are some problems even his gift of gab can't fix; his best friend Satish (Arjunan) can't speak to women without jumbling his words and blurting out profanity, and the orphanage Aravind grew up in is threatened with closure by their surly landlord (Vinu Chakravarty).

Anjana (Nazriya Nazim) is a doctor, and she does not like to communicate.  She lives with her father (Abhishek Shankar) and her stepmother Vidhya (Madhoo), with whom she does not get along, and she's dating Vinodh (Abhinav), a controlling jerk who nags her into not wearing her glasses because he thinks she looks better without.

Meanwhile, "Nuclear Star" Bhoomesh (John Vijay) is filming a movie in the area, or at least he's trying to - the shooting is constantly being disrupted by protests from the Drunkard's Union, who want the movie banned because they feel it will portray alcoholism in a bad light.  (I did mention the absurdism, right?)  The Fan's Union also arrives to counter-protest, and nobody is willing to listen.

And then everything changes when Panimalai is stricken with "Dumb Flu," a mysterious illness which starts with a nasty cough and may rob the victim of the ability to speak.  This is bad for Aravind, because he's a door to door salesman and nobody wants to open their doors to a stranger during a pandemic.  But it's also good for Aravind because when he goes to the hospital to get tested (with a nasal swab) he meets Anjana, and they strike up a sweet, flirtatious friendship.  Aravind shares his philosophy, that every problem can be solved if people just speak form their hearts, and Anjana shares hers, which is no they can't.  They make a bet - if Aravind is able to resolve the dispute around Bhoomesh's movie, Anjana will tell Vinodh how she feels about his controlling ways, and try to have a heart to heart with Vidhya.  If he fails, he has to fetch Anjana a signed picture of Bhoomesh.  (She's a fan.)

The Dumb Flu gets worse, and Panimalai is put under s strict quarantine.  And when it's discovered that the disease spreads through people talking, the entire town is ordered to keep silent.  At this point the leader of the local opposition party declares that the Dumb Flu is a hoax, a conspiracy cooked up by the government in order to control people's lives, and he gives a fiery speech about how he will never comply with government silence mandates before keeling over and becoming the first person to die of Dumb Flu, which probably seemed really unrealistic back in 2014.

And at this point the film basically becomes a silent movie, with Aravind struggling to make peace between the dueling unions while robbed of his greatest asset, his voice.  Meanwhile, Vinodh silently proposes in front of Anjana's family, leaving her feeling pressured to accept and try to be happy about it, and Satish manages to strike up a relationship with a pretty nurse (Nakshathra Nagesh).  Wackiness ensues, but it does so silently, as everybody tries to resolve their various subplots while waiting for a vaccine.

Vaayai Moodi Pesavum is by turns silly and sweet; there's a bit of satire mixed in as well, but it's largely gentle satire, with the hardest hitting bits only becoming hard hitting in retrospect.  The silent parts of the film are particularly well done, with the cast conveying a great deal of emotion and meaning through gestures and facial expressions.  And any musical number featuring masked gangsters clashing with dapper mimes is worth bonus points in my book.