For decades, Indian romantic comedies have operated on a deceptively simple premise: the hero's journey to win the girl. The camera followed his heartbreak, his determination, his transformation. Success was measured by his conquest, while the heroine's inner world - her desires, doubts, and damage - remained unexplored, only relevant as they affected his story.

But something fundamental has shifted in South Indian cinema. A new wave of filmmakers is dismantling this architecture, finally centering romantic narratives around questions long ignored: What does she want?

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Films like ‘The Girlfriend’, ‘Lover’, ‘Ithiri Neram’, and ‘Aaromaley’ are not just adding strong female characters — they’re interrogating the very DNA of romantic cinema: its gaze, sympathies, and moral universe.

Devdas to soup boys: A dangerous evolution

To understand the shift, consider films like ‘Arjun Reddy’, ‘Mayakkam Enna’, and ‘Remo’. Rahul Ravindran, director of ‘The Girlfriend’, traces his film’s genesis to the "soup boy" movement – a trend glorifying the pain of the jilted lover. As Ravindran recalls, "The idea for the story happened almost 12 or 13 years back, when we were at the peak of the soup boy movement in South Indian cinema. I used to constantly every week see songs and films coming out that glorify the pain of the jilted lover.”

This new generation of cinema moved past the tragic Devdas archetype. "Devdas sort of drinks himself to death and destroys his own life, but the soup boys were going beyond that, and they were seeing ‘righteous revenge’. They go, ‘You made me suffer, so I shall make you suffer in return.’" Audiences would cheer on protagonists who enacted elaborate vengeance on women who rejected them.

“That is when this idea emerged.