143 Hyderabad

With a prologue about psychopaths, you leave with a with a lurking impression that the film maker is making a valiant attempt to get there. Full of incongruities and abetted by a script that is dedicated to loud and screechy sounds and hazy night shots, the film is a complete disaster. So bereft of reason, skill and class the film maker gives fresh impetus to the school of thought that scripts must be certified before being made into films. With three decades at writing on cinema I have always maintained that the theme and the premise of its grammar are the prerogative of the filmmaker, the critic only steps in to critically evaluate it within the said boundaries. The time to revisit the premise has tragically arrived.
The time to part from the hitherto liberal approach or at least test its social credibility (without sounding too fascist) has since arrived. Gory violence and senseless killings, justifications and tickling the voyeuristic psyche in a midst of a social order already in flux and showing signs of wear and tear, is perhaps too heavy a price to pay in the name of cinema. At the risk of sounding intolerant, we need to review the hygiene of our liberal approach. Atleast this film demands it.
It is about 5 insane persons haunted by a few psychopaths stewed together with a high degree of delinquency. The mind that envisages the tale and its telling in the said form could be the breeding place of social disorder of a mental kind and may require more than attention through a column of this measure and space.
Jo (Dhanishka), Sam (Anand), Arun (Jegan), Priya (Lakshmi) and Milo (Kumaravel) are a group of friends. While Joe is an actress, who obviously has not many films, and Priya is doing some archaeological research for Oxford University, yes hold your breadth, Oxford and is thus on a picture shoot of temples. They decide to visit this temple that is 143 kms from a defined milestone from Hyderabad. There is something eerie about the place and no adventurist would even want to have a peep into this bizarre setting. It makes a Ram Gopal Varma world look safe and human. Killings a plenty, sanguineous and slaughterous, you are taken on a trip that is as tedious as for the characters that make it in the film. With the preface on why killers kill and even a reference to the hallowed Hitchcock you would expect a modicum of a connect between the killings and the mind influenced strongly by a happening at an impressionable age. It turns out to a madcap revenge saga on a changing economic scenario where the local mill which supported the local economy is closed down. The film is as far from Hitchcock as Dhoti Lota Aur Chowpathy was from a work of Woodhouse.
The cast and crew are helpless victims to the tale that knows no logic, acknowledges no class. No person is worth mentioning in the positive. This is the kind of film, where the guy working on the projector is tempted to invent and apply a fast forward button.
In case you fancy or aspire to buy yourself a ticket to a concentration camp, here is an opportunity. Buy yourself a ticket and realise that it is worse than travelling 143 kms around Hyderabad in the sweltering heat of the day. Caveat Emptor.
L. Ravichander
Stars: None
+ : None
– : The film.