'Maareesan' Movie Review: Fahadh Faasil, Vadivelu Try To Save This Regressive Road Film

When will filmmakers begin to see women as bodies that can exist outside sexual trauma? It is a question worth asking, a question whose answer we know, but we should keep asking anyway, because it keeps getting provoked, for women are only entering these cinematic worlds by being brutalised. Maharaja (2025) and Vettaiyaan (2024) immediately come to mind. 

In Maareesan, too, which actually begins as a bumbling story of two men—Dhaya (Fahadh Faasil) who keeps stealing and Velayudham Pillai (Vadivelu) who keeps forgetting—the men’s odyssey whose Ithaca keeps shifting, has women entering it in the second hour only from the framework of sexual violence, pedophilia, suicide, and its investigation. That apart, there is nothing else to them. This cinematic vision is diseased and exhausting. You can see how the writer V. Krishna Moorthy and director Sudheesh Sankar have used violence against women as a mere plot ploy in the half-hearted, haphazard way in which these scenes are written and executed. 

The film begins with the image of a rat, having escaped drowning, ending up in the vicinity of a snake, almost inviting its own death. Will the rat be forsaken? Is the rat’s destiny only death? Is it Dhaya or Velayudham who is the rat here? The snake? These questions haunt the film, which immediately cuts to Dhaya being released from prison and going about his day, emptying others’ pockets until he chances upon a house he thinks he can loot. What he finds inside, instead, is Velayudham, handcuffed. 

Valyudham tells him that the house has no money or valuables to steal, but promises Dhaya money from the ATM if he slashes open the handcuffs, which Dhaya does, but the only scratch in the plan is that Velayudham keeps forgetting things—his son, his life, his ATM PIN. If Saiyaara used Alzheimer’s to give its sagging love story some immediate, pressing drama, Maareesan uses it to keep the drama in the first hour on its toes. 

Velayudham also needs to get somewhere, Palakkad he says first, but keeps shifting the destination, sometimes to Thiruvannamalai, with every surge and surfeit of memory. Dhaya takes him around on his bike, hoping to empty his bank account in the course of their trip.

A still from 'Maareesan'

It is like two forces coming together, one who has no future, and the other who is not able to see his past, both trying to while away the present. In the thick of feeling, Velayudham eloquently says, and Vadivelu painfully enacts, “Jnabagam thaan vaazhkai,” (To live is to remember), but these scenes of both shuffling between cities and towns are not able to conjure the charm, wit, or propulsion of a road film. The writing is constantly gesturing at something that will happen later, because it seems implausible that the film will sustain from the inertia of the first hour’s lethargic, meandering tone. 

Velayudham’s memory slipping and surfacing becomes the source of narrative frustration—for Dhaya, for us, too. He looks at Dhaya and sometimes sees his son, sometimes Dhaya. Sometimes, he does not even recognise him. Every scene ripens a new possibility. It is only around the intermission, when the image of the snake and the rat is brought back in a voiceover, that the film’s surface ripples. Is there more to Velayudham than his lapse of memory? To Dhaya than his lapse of morals? For a film about journeys, not destinations, the desire to speed past the peripherals is a stab to its stomach. 

Then, there is the question of the title itself; Maareesan or Maricha, the rakshasa who becomes a golden deer that lures Rama into the forest, so Sita could be kidnapped by Ravana. Who is being lured? Into what? It is this wicked promise that buoys Maareesan forward, picking up stray musical threads from ‘Aha inba nilavinile’ in Mayabazar to ‘Moongil Thottam’ in Kadal, whose rhythm and melody leave behind anything composer Yuvan Shankar Raja can concoct for this film. 

Then women enter the story, brutalised, and the film nosedives into a bloody chase —we see hammers being arced into a face without a cut—that is regressive in its intention, sluggish in its execution, but most egregiously, without a sense of power, provocation, or even persuasion that often smooth over a film’s rancid ideas.

Vadivelu and Fahadh Faasil—who even gets his ‘FaFa’ theme song—are both actors whose presence on screen allows them to conjure whole worlds into words. They have slipped so comfortably into the skin of their characters, their backstories, their intentions don’t need to be explained with such a heavy hand to make their actions palpable. The performance of their action is often enough. The chestnut wideness of Faasil’s eyes or the translucent openness of Vadivelu’s —they allow worlds to permeate their beings. (They both also acted together, on opposite sides of a moral line in Maamannan, a film that did as much for them as they did for it.)

So, when a film like Maareesan comes along, throwing these two bodies into these two characters in the midst of an action, you are not immediately yearning for a larger explanation—but the film wants to give it, because it believes in the ignorance of the audience more than the knowledge of the physical presence of its actors. This clarity, like razor blades, slashes at the film—whatever was left of it. Sometimes you should trust the people on whom you hang your vision.