LIK (2026) Movie Review: Vignesh Shivan’s Film Taps into Brainrot, but Fails to Indulge in Its Mess

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Isn’t social media itself a jagged, clueless mess? We are endlessly doomscrolling reels, shorts, stories, posts, carousels, updates, and whatnot. What if all this shot beautifully, frame by frame, like a painting, with a vivid colour palette adorned, VFX-heavy, DI-eyed, and presented to you with the same meme-driven score — that’s essentially “LIK” (“Love Insurance Kompany). The issue isn’t with the film looking like eye candy, resplendent, but rather the choice of disowning chaos to creep in, in any frame.

Take, for a scene, addicts shattering phones, it’s supposed to feel severed, but it’s like breaking a glass, their throw adds a sound effect, immediately cut to next. In “LIK,” the framing of virality and its chaos is obedient, lighthearted, if you could say. This framing turns tiresome when the film shifts entirely to its detailed futuristic setting, albeit with mistakes (that’s adorable), rather than on the commodification of love. Few Vignesh Shivan signatures lie like the pun on skipping a beat or the lecture on economics of love, but they stay, few and far between.

This is why LIK’s comparison with “Nosedive,” the Bryce Dallas Howard “Black Mirror” episode, feels misplaced. Nosedive’s consistent pastel aesthetic eventually snaps, showing how ratings determine one’s social status; it turns rather bleak. Again, the issue isn’t why Vignesh’s film didn’t take on caste, class, and socioeconomic status, but how he sanitizes the grimness of an addiction with aesthetics. It’s harder to look at the commodification of love when the film itself feels like a luxurious commodity.

But Vignesh’s attempt at capturing brainrot culture is plausible. He knows when to self-censor and not to. Builds Vibes Vassey (Pradeep Ranganathan) world in a way that the ideas he brings suit his narrative. Vibe’s encounter with Dheema (Krithi Shetty) in the rain is fortuitous rather than deliberate and establishes the specificity of the umbrella early on.

The 2040 Chennai makeover is intriguing in conception, if uneven in execution. Suriyan (SJ Suryah), as a multi-billionaire tech guru reshaping intimacy through an AI-driven app, is trademark form here; he is jocular, natty, and does things giddily. Vignesh plays up with the casting choice of almost putting every popular Tamil influencer on screen. Even stunt-casting Seeman, a filmmaker-turned-agrarian society proponent politician, as an ashram guru striving towards a tech-free world, and gives him a scene to preach against the so-called elite’s English.

Vignesh knows that to make a film on social media, you need influencers, but his struggle is how much is too much. This dilemma arises when he juggles making an out-and-out fun, carefree film on an AI app playing with lovers and then immediately shifting to a purist kind of cinema, where emotions are dialled up, modernity is ditched, and ‘protecting the culture’ is preached. This all happens when the film itself turns problematic with its male gaze, portraying men ogling prolongedly at its female lead, describing her in detail, using casual phrasing of b*tch, and even objectifying a model to titillate men.

It’s understandable why few see “LIK” with repulsion, calling it cringe. Because filming the oddity of social media will anyway risk being obsolete, risk being too authentic, binarized in sense. Boxing a generation in a single film becomes typifying the era, just as Vignesh does what writer Charlie Squire termed as “pithy liberal presentation of marketable representation” — chose to represent wealthy influencers, ignoring small rural people doing the same.

The film does feel distanced and dissolved. Distancing itself from what is ambivalent internet — a term Whitney Phillips and Ryan M Milner consciously classify to capture social media’s franticsm and its double-edged nature (earnest internet on the other side). Conscious as most digital media scholars — Jessica Vitak, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Katy Pearce, Alice Marwick, Lucie Chateau, Gabriella Coleman, Jessica Beyer, Limor Shifman, to the prolific Kyle Chayka (even influencer blended writer Anrag Minus Verma and Joshua Citarella) imbibe social media as a swirling, shape-shifting mess of memetic play.

It feels dissolved because Vignesh’s framing of influencer culture, merely adopted by women alone for chasing social media validation, is deeply problematic, as LIK is run, voiced, and its algorithm is designed by men. Even the idea of profiting from women’s insecurities, especially coming from a man, makes the film’s gender-specific assignment of blame feel troubling, and its attempt to insulate Suriyan from criticism for reducing women to mere metrics ultimately feels flawed.

“LIK” throws brands like confetti, but where is the relevance, its purpose? Naomi Scott watered the audience in “Smile 2” with Voss, becoming an elixir, both for audiences and her character. That doesn’t mean there is no elixir in the film, it does breathe, pause, take a look at its colourful world, and goes back to being safe, sanitised, and terrified of its own shadows.

There’s an undeniable energy in “LIK,” the frames go close, cut far, but stay intimate. It’s like it never wants to leave viewers’ eyes, to not let them drift apart, to anything. Is engaging the right word? Enchanting? Immersive? Not sure, but the film wants you to imagine a few, throw logic out, and wish to go bonkers, but only entrancingly, aesthetically.

Vignesh traps the algorithmic, attention- and context-collapsing nature of social media and its memes much like the audience itself: he dilutes it, concentrates it, strips the joy out of it, and repeats it over and over until boredom mutates into a kind of memetic terror. He knows the industry does the same to its meme jingles, to use them every single time until it becomes a commodity, an asset to sell a product, a reel, a promo, a film, even.

But in the midst of running with it, he forgets Internet’s Ugly (as described by writer Nick Douglas) and tags digital excess as pulchritude to be legible. Vignesh literally does what an AI chatbot does: offer pleasing responses (frames) and keep you coming back instead of challenging your thoughts. Writer Anna Wiener, in her internet-contrary essay “Love in the Time of AI Companies,” understands and absorbs vulnerable people’s desperate need for a listener in a way Vignesh ultimately fails to. Wiener looks at Chatbots’ allure of pausing, its silence, space, and softness of a mild mutuality–as she writes, it’s “the appeal of pushing the boundaries of consciousness, and the simple fact that there is no greater pleasure than good chat.” The same sociologist, James Muldoon, explores in Love Machines.

“LIK” also feels old-school in a way (not the boomerish one), although it does end up being that in the penultimate scenes, but it’s old-school in a Kollywood way, as in, Vignesh decides to shoot songs elaborately with massive sets and artwork instead of relegating them to montages. It’s refreshing, for one, Tamil films have either moved away from songs or, as said before, it’s montages. Second, the songs are within the setting but also out of it. Meaning, they feel part of the film itself.

Take “Enakenna Yaarum Illaye,” Anirudh’s viral indie, now finally part of a film’s album. The song is sad, self-pitying, and also male-centric. It’s essentially a peppy soup song for dejected men lamenting their break-ups. (as still perceived in online forums). As an indie that connected with many men, Vignesh exemplifies its vibe. In the film, Vibe breaks the fourth wall (ahem, several times) and recruits audiences to sing along. Vignesh harvests the song’s existing online viscerality, its hook of male lamentation for a collective catharsis, but simultaneously, twists its gender lens and its perceptibility.

Kalki, Vibe’s close friend (played by Gowri Kishan), briefly hijacks the song, dancing in a bar with women, drinking, and inhabiting the same heartbreak as Vibe, turning the track intermediately female-centric. This disruption within the soup song ecosystem is a rarity, but not unprecedented. Songs like STR’s Beer Biryani, Yuvan’s Kaadhal Oru Kattukkadhai, ARR’s It’s a Breakup Da, or Anirudh’s own Neeyenna Periya Appatakkara? had captured female rebuttals to this often problematic sub-genre, but “LIK” doesn’t reach Tamil Padam 2’s Evanda Unna Petha level of full subversion; it merely borrows the impulse to balance the gaze.

This shift in gender lens can also be viewed in how delicately Vignesh integrates queer people into the film’s world, refusing to judge, dramatise, or lean into tired stereotypes, and instead, representing queerness with the same casual normalcy afforded to cis-het lovers. Sometimes, quiet subversion in the mainstream is also needed to persuade society to normalise LGBTQIA+ identities.

“LIK” is also part magic realism, meaning it’s close to reality, but also fantasised. It stays liminal where both ideas meet. When it confronts reality, it pops like bubbles, like when Pradeep, in a well-staged scene, rants about the current state of the job search—cuts, loss, firing, hiring, ghosting, AI slopocalypse, and the apps that search jobs for you—with spams, scams, and fakery. While such a scene can easily be dismissed as a mere monologue of a Tamil film hero, in “LIK,” the confrontation itself is needed, not just as justification for humans to believe in the app but also as a reflection of the real world in an imaginative one. It’s perhaps the only scene allowing some real-world issues to creep in; the frantic-ness in its dialogue delivery is quite matchy.

Vignesh Shivan’s “LIK” is ultimately like candyfloss: sweet, airy, and gone before we can even grasp what all its swirling energy was trying to bombard us with in the form of a dopamine hit. While “LIK” turns theatres into a time-travel trip through a 2040s version of Tinder, 80s Tinder feels the same; maybe time-travelling is the dopamine to go for, a reverse nostalgia?