‘Mrithyunjay’ Movie Review: Sree Vishnu’s Thriller Has The Smarts But Settles for Convenience

It wouldn’t be fair to call Sree Vishnu’s Mrithyunjay a whodunit. Granted, the film does largely revolve around a cat-and-mouse game between a killer and a journalist who want to best one another. Murders are choreographed to look like accidents, exhausted cops are frothing at the mouth to shut the cases preemptively, a pattern comes to the fore, and a chase begins. But here is where the Telugu crime drama averts the obvious. Mrithyunjay isn’t a film where you ID the perpetrator in the last act, jolted to see a nice guy you’ve seen all through the film, show his true colours. The film effectively introduces its killer to us and then works backwards to show us why he’s the perfect criminal.

For a film that’s named after “the one who conquers death”, Mrithyunjay relies a great deal on death. Mrithyunjay is led by Sree Vishnu’s Jay, a glorified journalist, who, in reality, cat-fishes to bring obit ads for the local daily. Jay, propelled by Vishnu’s flair for comedy, dresses up every day to mingle and sorrowfully make nice at funerals in the hope that someone gives him an ad. But what he wants to do in life is much different from his day job. An aspiring crime reporter, Jay spends all his nights with friends, who all have something to do with death — one is a mortician, the other runs a cemetery. A funeral stops him in his tracks, compelling him to believe it’s the work of an efficient killer — a killer that Jay and the film quickly become obsessed with.

The film moves quite tactfully once Jay figures out his purpose in life. “It’s terrible when our loved ones die, but what’s worse when we don’t know how they died,” he says at one point, seeing himself in a stunted, meek 8-year-old girl who just lost her father. A promise to the young girl leads him on a mission to find the killer and himself in the process. He finds help in Seetha (Reba Monica John), a perfectly capable police chief with a high moral compass. She oversteps instructions and calls the case a murder when her superiors wanted to brush the details under the carpet. She’s set up to be an important part of this investigation, only to be mind-bogglingly sidelined for the rest of the film.

If the makers wanted Jay to lead the inquiry — and in this case, it is true — why bother bringing in another character, a senior police officer no less, into the picture? Any respect we have for Seetha is snatched away in the way she misses the basics of police solving. Jay, however, never misses anything. Of course, there could’ve been a better way to write these portions, but the film ignores Seetha, the only investigating officer, just as much as she ignores Jay’s very useful observations.

So the rest of the film revolves around Jay nabbing the contract killer, in a series of convenient writing choices. He hears the word “perfection” on the radio, and suddenly realises the surgical nature of the killer’s modus operandi. He hears the word “practice” and, of course, suddenly fits an important piece of the puzzle. A lot of this can also be alluded to his amateur detective skills — something that could’ve been complemented by Seetha if she were incorporated into the world better.

The best part of the film, however, is the contract killer. The film approaches him in a no-frills, no-sentimentality kind of way, a refreshing departure from the revenge and serial killer arcs we’re accustomed to seeing. The killer knows who Jay is, but the opposite isn’t true. This leaves way for various interesting scenes in the thriller, pushing us to the edge of the seat. The film does end on a high note, making a sharp observation about the futility of evading death. For a film that places so much importance on the surgical precision of its crimes, the execution could have used a lot more of it.