LOUNGE LOVES

Things to watch, read, hear, do—and other curated experiences from the team

CURL FANTASTIC

Manetain has quickly become one of the more hallowed brand names for Indians who follow the curly method. I’ve liked most of their products, but the best has been their original 3-in-1 conditioner. I was convinced that they couldn’t top that product and so it took me a few months, but I finally gave in and tried their new curl cream recently. It’s going to become another staple in my collection. Even for my extremely coarse and curly hair in this dry summer, the curl cream has worked. Similar to Cantu’s curl activator, it’s a thick formulation that will keep curls moisturised well for a few days without weighing them down. And it makes me even happier to use another vegan, Indian-made product by a women-run company rather than buying an imported product off Amazon.

— Dakshayani Kumaramangalam

BADSHAAH, A VODKA

Among all spirits, I considered vodka to be the most blah. It has no personality, no flavours—it’s just acrid alcohol. Blame this perception on my limited exposure. Few days ago, I tried the DYavol vodka. Redolent with tastes of cinnamon, star anise and citrus, it’s velvety smooth and made for drinking on the rocks. It’s made in Poland and the bottle says it’s filtered through black pearls. Months ago, a bartender had told me that celebs like to sip on vodka with a squeeze of lime. Shah Rukh Khan is one of the four investors of the brand. I connected the dots and tried to separate the vodka from the overpowering personality of the actor. Even if SRK is out of the picture, it could hold its ground.

— Jahnabee Borah

ALIENS, AGAIN

Face-huggers, an alien species, bloodcurdling screams—but no one can listen to you in deep space. The Alien movie franchise is getting a much-needed injection of fresh fear with Alien: Romulus, which is set to release in August. A short teaser, unveiled earlier this month, holds plenty of promise. But even more gripping is the movie’s teaser poster—it’s dark, terrifying, minimal and a big throwback to the original Alien (1979), which spawned a cult science-fiction horror movie franchise. The poster for Romulus is set on a pitch-black background too but shows a portion of the xenomorph alien’s elongated head—with its razor-sharp teeth—and the creature salivating from its mouth, adding vicious detail to the poster. —Nitin Sreedhar

A MIRROR TO SOCIETY

If it weren’t for a persistent nudge from the algorithm, I’d have skipped Aattam, a Malayalam film, currently playing on Amazon Prime. Directed by Anand Ekarshi, the plot is intriguing: The lone woman actor in a 13-member theatre troupe makes a sexual assault allegation against one of her colleagues. The crux of the movie is about how the other 11 men in the troupe deal with it. What makes

Aattam a compelling watch is that it hits close to home. We have all seen the #MeToo movement unravel. We continue to have conversations each time a woman makes an allegation. Questions like “Why did she take so much time to make the complaint?” “Shouldn’t we hear the man’s version of the story too?”are passed around too frequently. Aattam presents all of this in a minimalistic setting with dialogues that are not preachy.

— Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran.