Middle Class (2025): A Quiet Gut-Punch That Feels Like Eavesdropping on Your Own Life
There’s a moment about halfway through Middle Class—Anjali Menon’s tender, bruising new Malayalam-Hindi bilingual—when the protagonist, 41-year-old IT project manager Arun Venkat (Fahadh Faasil), stands in his Gurgaon high-rise balcony at 2 a.m., staring at the blinking lights of a city that no longer feels like home. He’s holding a phone showing a bank app: ₹47,832 in savings after this month’s EMI, school fees, and parents’ medical bills. The camera lingers on his face for what feels like an eternity. No dialogue. No background score.
Just the distant hum of the Delhi Metro and the soft click of his wife switching off the bedroom light because the electricity bill is already ₹9,400 this quarter. If you’ve ever belonged to India’s “new middle class,” that silence will feel louder than any explosion in a Rohit Shetty movie.Middle Class is not a film that shouts. It whispers, and somehow that makes the pain sharper.Fahadh Faasil, in what might be the most restrained performance of his career, plays Arun like a man slowly drowning in 8.5% home-loan interest rates. He isn’t poor—his family eats three meals, the kids go to a “good” school, they even took a Singapore vacation in 2019—but he’s one medical emergency or one layoff away from disaster.
The film follows two turbulent months in 2024-25 when everything that can go wrong does: his mother’s sudden cardiac arrest, his daughter’s Class 9 coaching fees doubling, the dreaded “restructuring” email from his American client, and the quiet humiliation of discovering his wife Meera (Rasika Dugal) has been secretly doing freelance content writing at night just to keep the ship afloat.
Anjali Menon, returning to direction after the warm hug that was Bangalore Days, has made something colder, angrier, and truer here. The script (co-written with newcomer Syed Abbas) refuses easy villains. There’s no evil builder, no corrupt politician chewing scenery. The enemy is systemic, faceless: inflation, lifestyle creep, the WhatsApp groups where neighbors flex iPhone 16 Pros while you’re still paying off a 13 mini in 36 EMIs. When Arun’s boss (a terrifyingly convincing Vijay Sethupathi in a 15-minute cameo) casually says, “We’re all middle class, bro—some just have better Excel skills,” you want to reach into the screen and strangle him with his own noise-canceling AirPods.
The film’s masterstroke is its refusal to treat money conversations as vulgar. Characters talk about numbers the way real families do—awkwardly, obsessively, lovingly. Meera calculating grocery bills on PhonePe while cooking. Arun’s father (a heartbreaking Nedumudi Venu in one of his final roles) refusing to sell his ancestral thodi in Thrissur because “sentiments don’t have an NPV.” A ten-minute scene where the couple debates whether to pull their son out of cricket academy (“₹28,000 per term, Arun, for what? He wants to be a YouTuber!”) is more stressful than most action set-pieces released this year.
Cinematographer Shyju Khalid shoots Gurgaon like a beautiful prison: gleaming glass towers reflected in sewage-filled potholes, Uber drops at gated societies where security guards earn less in a month than residents spend on one pub night. The sound design is surgical—every notification ping, every EMI reminder, every pressure cooker whistle feels like a small act of violence.
Yet for all its bleakness, Middle Class is never miserly with hope. Meera and Arun’s marriage—frayed, exhausted, still funny—feels lived-in and real. Watch Rasika Dugal’s face when she discovers Arun has secretly pawned his mother’s gold bangle to pay her hospital deposit; it’s a masterclass in acting with your eyes. The children (newcomers Diya and Aaron Sanjay) aren’t precocious cine-kids; they’re bratty, phone-addicted, occasionally heartbreakingly perceptive (“Appa, are we poor now?”).
The last 20 minutes risk sentimentality but earn every tear. I won’t spoil it, but when Arun finally breaks down in his empty office cubicle at 3 a.m., crying not because he lost his job but because he realizes he’s spent 15 years optimizing PowerPoint slides for people who don’t know his children’s names—you’ll feel something crack inside your chest.Middle Class will be called “relatable” a thousand times in WhatsApp forwards, and that word will feel too small. It’s not just relatable; it’s surgical. It’s the movie that plays inside the heads of millions of Indians every time they check CRED reminders or see Zomato valuations while their own increments stagnate at 6%.
Leave the theater and you’ll notice things you never did before: the tired eyes of the Uber driver who studied engineering, the way your colleague laughs a little too loudly at layoffs, the quiet shame of calculating “per person” cost before saying yes to a friend’s destination wedding.
Middle Class doesn’t offer solutions. It doesn’t need to. Sometimes recognition is revolution enough.
Verdict: See it with someone who pays EMIs. Then go home and hug them. Quietly check your mutual fund balance later. You’ll need to.Rating: 4.5/5 — Not just a film. A mirror held too close.
There’s a moment about halfway through Middle Class—Anjali Menon’s tender, bruising new Malayalam-Hindi bilingual—when the protagonist, 41-year-old IT project manager Arun Venkat (Fahadh Faasil), stands in his Gurgaon high-rise balcony at 2 a.m., staring at the blinking lights of a city that no longer feels like home. He’s holding a phone showing a bank app: ₹47,832 in savings after this month’s EMI, school fees, and parents’ medical bills. The camera lingers on his face for what feels like an eternity. No dialogue. No background score.
Just the distant hum of the Delhi Metro and the soft click of his wife switching off the bedroom light because the electricity bill is already ₹9,400 this quarter. If you’ve ever belonged to India’s “new middle class,” that silence will feel louder than any explosion in a Rohit Shetty movie.Middle Class is not a film that shouts. It whispers, and somehow that makes the pain sharper.Fahadh Faasil, in what might be the most restrained performance of his career, plays Arun like a man slowly drowning in 8.5% home-loan interest rates. He isn’t poor—his family eats three meals, the kids go to a “good” school, they even took a Singapore vacation in 2019—but he’s one medical emergency or one layoff away from disaster.
The film follows two turbulent months in 2024-25 when everything that can go wrong does: his mother’s sudden cardiac arrest, his daughter’s Class 9 coaching fees doubling, the dreaded “restructuring” email from his American client, and the quiet humiliation of discovering his wife Meera (Rasika Dugal) has been secretly doing freelance content writing at night just to keep the ship afloat.
Anjali Menon, returning to direction after the warm hug that was Bangalore Days, has made something colder, angrier, and truer here. The script (co-written with newcomer Syed Abbas) refuses easy villains. There’s no evil builder, no corrupt politician chewing scenery. The enemy is systemic, faceless: inflation, lifestyle creep, the WhatsApp groups where neighbors flex iPhone 16 Pros while you’re still paying off a 13 mini in 36 EMIs. When Arun’s boss (a terrifyingly convincing Vijay Sethupathi in a 15-minute cameo) casually says, “We’re all middle class, bro—some just have better Excel skills,” you want to reach into the screen and strangle him with his own noise-canceling AirPods.
The film’s masterstroke is its refusal to treat money conversations as vulgar. Characters talk about numbers the way real families do—awkwardly, obsessively, lovingly. Meera calculating grocery bills on PhonePe while cooking. Arun’s father (a heartbreaking Nedumudi Venu in one of his final roles) refusing to sell his ancestral thodi in Thrissur because “sentiments don’t have an NPV.” A ten-minute scene where the couple debates whether to pull their son out of cricket academy (“₹28,000 per term, Arun, for what? He wants to be a YouTuber!”) is more stressful than most action set-pieces released this year.
Cinematographer Shyju Khalid shoots Gurgaon like a beautiful prison: gleaming glass towers reflected in sewage-filled potholes, Uber drops at gated societies where security guards earn less in a month than residents spend on one pub night. The sound design is surgical—every notification ping, every EMI reminder, every pressure cooker whistle feels like a small act of violence.
Yet for all its bleakness, Middle Class is never miserly with hope. Meera and Arun’s marriage—frayed, exhausted, still funny—feels lived-in and real. Watch Rasika Dugal’s face when she discovers Arun has secretly pawned his mother’s gold bangle to pay her hospital deposit; it’s a masterclass in acting with your eyes. The children (newcomers Diya and Aaron Sanjay) aren’t precocious cine-kids; they’re bratty, phone-addicted, occasionally heartbreakingly perceptive (“Appa, are we poor now?”).
The last 20 minutes risk sentimentality but earn every tear. I won’t spoil it, but when Arun finally breaks down in his empty office cubicle at 3 a.m., crying not because he lost his job but because he realizes he’s spent 15 years optimizing PowerPoint slides for people who don’t know his children’s names—you’ll feel something crack inside your chest.Middle Class will be called “relatable” a thousand times in WhatsApp forwards, and that word will feel too small. It’s not just relatable; it’s surgical. It’s the movie that plays inside the heads of millions of Indians every time they check CRED reminders or see Zomato valuations while their own increments stagnate at 6%.
Leave the theater and you’ll notice things you never did before: the tired eyes of the Uber driver who studied engineering, the way your colleague laughs a little too loudly at layoffs, the quiet shame of calculating “per person” cost before saying yes to a friend’s destination wedding.
Middle Class doesn’t offer solutions. It doesn’t need to. Sometimes recognition is revolution enough.
Verdict: See it with someone who pays EMIs. Then go home and hug them. Quietly check your mutual fund balance later. You’ll need to.Rating: 4.5/5 — Not just a film. A mirror held too close.