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.