'Stephen' Movie Review: Explosive Ideas In This Uneven Serial Killer Origin Story

Among the core ideas that makes Stephen a particularly peculiar film is how it plays on the concept of what is called a Liar’s Paradox. It’s a film that’s already constructed as a collection of confessions and we’re informed early on about the sketchy unreliability of its narrators but what the film does is take a step further by also making its protagonist a compulsive liar. And as the paradox goes, if a liar tells you that he’s a liar, is he lying or is he telling you the truth?

It’s this strange space between truth and dream logic where Stephen finds its home. In this, it becomes unlike the typical serial killer thriller that centres itself around the need to solve a crime that hasn’t yet taken place, after they understand the patterns of a compulsive killer. With Stephen, the idea is to alternate between the grounded realities of a police officer and a forensic investigator, as they try to understand the motivations that made Stephen a killer and it then goes a step further by also trying to take you deep within the psyche of this psychopath.

Which means that it isn’t even interested in figuring why Stephen (an assured performance by Gomathi Shankar) chose to kill nine women, all aspiring actors and where he’d hidden their bodies. The film even begins with Stephen confessing to the crime and turning himself in. But what’s strange is how the film chooses to pick the track of the one woman Stephen could not get himself to kill. This may sound odd and excessive when you think of the film as a thriller but as a character study of a boy who never got the love he yearned for, Stephen makes for a compassionate reading of an unhinged mind.

But the film isn’t restricted to these two extreme viewpoints. For brief moments, we also get visuals of what an ideal world and an ideal love story would have looked like to Stephen. Here again, one’s unsure if or whether this episode took place in real or if it was all in Stephen’s head, but it then adds an additional layer, showing us a version of him as he sees himself. In the film’s most innovative take, we see a crosscut that merges the memories of Stephen getting married to his one true love, even as he battles demons within that urge him to punish her.

The theme of lost childhood continues to be expressed through the length of the film. But instead of tired motifs like that of toys or a teddy bear, the film uses the symbolism of a towering Ferris wheel to take us back to his childhood. As Stephen tries to make peace with the thoughts that disturb him, we see flashes of this Ferris wheel turning and the strange turns his life takes to get him where he is.

Yet, for all these high concepts that make up the film’s runtime, we’re always made to feel how its production feels rough around the edges. For a movie that operates in such a complex space, the dialogue and performances needed to be far more than perfunctory. Instead of trusting itself to explain its inner workings through abstract imagery, we often see the film using lines of exposition to explain the cleverness of what it’s trying to say. And when it’s not, one finds the smaller performances too pedestrian to be capable of doing justice to its concepts and characters.

In a striking finale, as Stephen comes to terms with life in prison, the staging turns into an elaborate vision of what it feels like to be inside his head. Within the suffocating walls of a police van, we see Stephen confronting his parents for doing what they did. But these sequences also show us Stephen as he confronts himself and the decisions he made to be the criminal he has become.

Of course, a bigger budget could have solved most of the problems in Stephen, and it could also have done better with experienced actors. But this experiment never devolves into a mere indulgence and the film’s director Mithun maintains control over his complex material, even when it looks like it’s slipping away. It’s not often that you feel like you’ve empathised with the mind of serial killer.