Yet, I felt no such discomfort while watching an entire segment based on this idea in Anantham. Despite all the potential for darkness, the story chooses light by embracing the idea of unconventional love. Through the segment, Krishnan Menon, director Priya shows us how with the right gaze, taboo tales can actually be heart-warming and fun. This sensitivity of the filmmaker is apparent across all the episodes of this part hyper-link, part anthology series. Though Anantham is predominantly a tale of victims, it never tries to milk their ordeals. Instead, it gives us a window seat into their minds and shows us the power of helplessness and how it can devour people, period and place notwithstanding.
Imagine eating a well-cooked dish where the spices are perfect and the seasoning is on point, but the meat unfortunately is rotten. Well, I had a similar after-taste watching Amala Paul's Cadaver. The murder mystery is tastefully made with top-notch works from Aravind Singh (cinematographer), San Lokesh (editor) and Ranjin Raj (composer). The rotten meat here is the shoddily written screenplay and story. This concoction is a really rare occurrence. With thrillers, it is usually the other way around, great ideas onpaper gets lost in translation to the screen. Cast: Amala Paul, Thrigun, Riythvika, Munishkanth
Interestingly, the younger version of Keerthi in the intro sequences is played by her niece Driya. Despite the brilliant casting, which acts as the film's USP, the duo's performance becomes a sort of stumbling block to the emotional core. It is strange to see the loving father and daughter oversell their chemistry in front of the camera. If you have seen any of their promotional interviews for the film, you will find the mismatch highly jarring. Even leaving aside the comparisons to reality, their performances during the initial emotional scenes leave us cold. Arun Pandian seems to have been slowly discovering his space in the film with each scene and finally gets comfortable with his character during the latter half, when things take a serious turn.
Make no mistake, she is neither the template 'modern girl' who lectures people on liberation. She is flawed, she is angelic, she could be any one of us and that makes Rachel and many other characters in Blood Money special. For instance, when a good man in the film who wouldn't mean harm to anyone, even in his dreams becomes a witness of a major crime, he doesn't do anything heroic, he just freezes like you and me. The people in this world are just swallowed by their own battles and the problem of the protagonist doesn't affect them much, and for some, it is just another news.
The issues start right after Kamali comes to Chennai. The film's novel commentary on the inherent discrimination in conservative families and the lack of opportunities in small towns vanishes and it suddenly gets reduced to an overlong college ad. While I was eager to find out how Kamali would fight her homesickness, lack of parental support, and linguistic barriers in an urban college, Rajasekar conveniently turns a blind eye to all this and makes every character onscreen chant the magic word 'IIT'. If you are given a rupee every time a character says the institution's name, you are sure to go home with a handsome amount. This is also the kind of universe where the bad guys speak English and the good ones don't. And how does one find out whether these baddies have turned a new leaf? It's simple: they start speaking Tamil! These not-so-friendly characters feel so under-written, alien, and sometimes, unintentionally funny.
The question though is, is efficient humour enough to make this a good film? I am not so sure. If the humour can be said to be in ‘Beast Mode’, the story never rises above ‘Energy Saver Mode’. The film is essentially Sathi Leelavathi, if you replace Ramesh Aravind’s character with, say, Dharmathin Thalaivan’s absent-minded professor played by Rajini. So predictable are the events that you can easily second-guess each development. The lead cast, however, does its best to keep matters engaging, even during the film’s weakest, cliched moments. It feels like the actors share a rhythm with each other, and their camaraderie helps elevate the effect of their performances. Vaibhav as Arun Kumar, a character faking memory loss, is a reasonably funny presence. His performance, especially in the scenes involving the daughter, serves as atonement for his visible struggle in the emotional segments.
