'Mirage' Movie Review: Jeethu Joseph Ties Himself Into Knots

It must have been some sort of a cruel in-joke to name the company Ashwin Kumar (Asif Ali) runs ‘Pure Facts’. It’s an online media company based out of Coimbatore, and we listen to Ashwin talk repeatedly about how he doesn’t believe in sensationalism or emotions, believing in a brand of objective journalism that provides pure facts to its viewers. You assume that he’s the stereotypical idealist but there’s always a dissonance between what he says and how he behaves. A few scenes later, after he’s tried to convince us of his ethical ways, he nonchalantly reveals how his modest operation makes money. Without making it sound like blackmail, he says he investigates the inner workings of big corporates and agrees to not reveal them on his platform for a “fee”.

He’s the first character in Mirage that we’re trained to be suspicious about. Written for the screen by Jeethu Joseph and Srinivasan Abrol, based on a story by Aparna R.Tarakad, this isn’t the typical Jeethu Joseph thriller we’ve come to expect. As plain as the film may seem, it’s written to mimic the core values (or the lack of values) you’d see in a classic 1940s noir. Each character is as inscrutable as the last, with a moral compass that is broken right from the start. Which is to say that it’s not a film in which you’re meant to pick a favourite. Everyone is a dark shade of grey with his/her own ulterior motives. In a scene immediately after Ashwin explains his modus operandi, we listen to Abhirami (Aparna Balamurali) explain the matter-of-factness of their new working relationship. It’s not because he wants to help her or because he’s in love with her. If Abhirami is looking for security and information from Ashwin, all Ashwin’s interested in is the chance to break some explosive news. Quid pro quo.

More than Jeethu Joseph’s, these are people who’d call a Sriram Raghavan movie their home. So, when a character takes an accusatory tone to call someone else a ‘double agent’, I laughed out loud. Everyone is a double agent in Mirage and there’s not a single “pure fact” worth trusting. And what this achieves is make the film irreducible to a good versus evil battle. Instead, what we see is an ascending order of criminals with each trying to outdo the last.

The plot itself is written around a cliche, that of an all-important hard disk with a secret password. The information in it threatens to affect everyone in State politics and is said to be of great import even to the Central ministry. But despite its value and the risks involved in travelling around with it, the film treats this device like a silly McMuffin from a Guy Ritchie movie. The crooks handling this bit of information appear too comical to be taken seriously, and there’s an unreal amount of convenience in the way all parties involved seem to know exactly what their enemies are up to. In one of the scenes that took me by surprise (unintentionally), we see a bad guy named Rajkumar figuring out the brain behind the stolen hard disk as though he’s pulling the information out of thin air.

But this isn’t to say that Mirage fails to entertain. Instead of engaging with its characters or their motivations, the film works as a seemingly efficient dispenser of twists. It tries hard to be loyal to its caption ‘Fades As You Get Closer’, with a desperation to throw a twist at you every 15 minutes or so. But instead of investing in the film enough to predict what’s going to happen, we realise quickly that there’s no point in that. When all the effort has been put in to simply shock you with new data that couldn’t have been arrived at organically, we simply watch on, only to see how far the film will go to do this.

And by the 10th twist, not only do we lose connection with every character, but also train ourselves to simply not believe a word of what they’re saying. In this process, it doesn’t matter to us if the hard disk reaches the right hands because everyone appears to be equally culpable. Later, when the goal post shifts to another cliche of a revenge motive, the plot has already tied itself into so many knots that you feel like you’re playing Sudoku on a misprinted newspaper. There are ideas in Mirage that may have sounded arresting at a screenplay level, written around the seediest bunch of characters. But in its effort to seduce you with surprises, we’re left with a Jeethu Joseph film that’s surprisingly devoid of thrills.