Director-writer Madhumita’s second release this month (after Love Always) is a far more sophisticated film, broaching topics often deemed too tough for our movies to discuss. Despite the hard exterior of an investigative thriller, it’s the dramatic moments that reveal the writer’s sensitivity. This is most evident in a scene where a broken father is called into a mortuary to identify a corpse. Rather than rushing through it for the sake of the larger plot, the film slows down and gives this parent the dignity he deserves. He’s nervous, confused, and hoping against hope in these brief moments. The film is just as invested in the police officer hero, for whom it is impossible to treat such an event as merely part of the job (he vomits when he reaches a crime scene early on).
The scene deserved a stronger actor to capture the father’s full emotions, but you see the difference when the camera turns to Arjun Das’ Chandru. His is a performance worth discussing separately, because he’s the antithesis of the police officer hero we usually see in our movies. He’s the son of a police officer, but he clearly takes after his more sensitive, caring mother. In an interrogation scene, he doesn’t arm-twist or beat the bad guy into submission, choosing instead to get there with patience and consideration. Instead of perpetuating male chauvinism, here’s a police officer that appears to be its victim.
This is the dichotomy that goes a long way when you see Chandru’s interactions with fellow officer A Rao (Sachana Natarajan). Despite the weight of all that’s going on, the movie briefly develops enjoyably into the dynamics of a fun buddy cop film. Just when you feel Chandru’s methods are too pacifist to deal with the mess they’re in, Rao steps, kicks butt and get what she wants.
The thriller aspect of the film comes with the case of children that go missing in similar fashion. The film reveals just as much about the case for us to understand all its seriousness without making it the only focus. Here again, it’s the dramatic moments that supersede the thriller. When Rao is deputed to confront a particularly troubled teenager, the topics vary from sibling rivalry to childhood trauma, jealousy to deep-rooted self-loathing. It’s like we know exactly how the scene will end and the information it will reveal, but the motivations for these actions feel so refreshing that you feel more interested in the whys and not so much the hows.
What draws you out of the film in regular intervals, though, is how it tries to be bilingual. A large portion of the film is said to take place in the TN-Kerala border, and you understand the logical reason for this mix in dialogues. But when that’s clubbed with sync sound, you struggle to make sense of what certain actors are saying, especially when it becomes clear that they’re speaking an alien tongue. The choice of actors playing the smaller characters too work overtime to take you away from the natural flow of the film.
But what feels most grating about the film is the way it lacks imagination in how it reveals valuable details about the case. In one instance, a character explains, in so many words, how she happened to see a creep disposing of a hard disk after spotting this man walking seedily into a neighbour’s house. It’s the kind of detail that changes the course of the film, but instead of showing this to us in an interesting manner, the film relies far too heavily on one convenient monologue.
The same can be said about how easy it feels to get to the film’s most important criminal. All it takes is a tiny nudge and it sets up a massive 20-minute information dump to reveal all of their motivations, modus operandi and even his dietary preferences. What you’d enjoyed so much in the earlier parts of the film, suddenly begin to go missing and a clever drama about bad parenting gets lost in a middling thriller about the most generic of twists.