Forgive my condescending tone here, but Indian cinema has rarely produced superior thrillers. By ‘superior’, I mean ticking off the three things that make them such a delight: cleverness, technique, and tautness. Whoever is entrusted with the task of delivering one needs to be clever while plotting them, needs to tell them right, and keep them crisp. It’s a delicate job. And in the case of Indian cinema, filmmakers have rarely succeeded.
I find a majority of Indian mystery-thrillers a bit of a slog to sit through. They are too oversimplified for me, too sloppily plotted. If one misses a detail, they need not worry. Indian filmmakers are in the habit of including a short montage at the end where pieces of the entire mystery come together, in the chronological order, for the sake of absolute clarity. I, for one, detest this habit of theirs. Mysteries need to come together in the head; putting them together on-screen hastily at the end indicates that either they – the filmmakers – weren’t too confident of their technique – which then leads us to question why they decided to tell it the way they did in the first place – or they think the audience isn’t bright enough to figure it out themselves. It does the genre, the audience, and also themselves a great disservice.
Debutant Karthick Naren’s Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru isn’t a slog to sit through, at least not in the beginning. It’s told mostly in flashbacks by a crippled ex-cop who revisits a most puzzling case: on a rainy night some years ago, there was a murder, an accident and a kidnapping, and these three events are mysteriously connected. Naren jumps from incident to incident, from clue to clue, and his stylish approach might seem a little bewildering at first (why do we need to know at what time the clues are discovered?), but we understand why the film is structured so when it finally begins to unravel. It’s exciting to watch the suspense being cleverly amped up, but it is also worrying because Naren tries to tell too many things at once. Things are a bit jumbled, but not too. Amusingly, at one point, the ex-cop says to the new recruit, “So, tell me everything that has happened so far, in the chronological order,” and the youngster obliges. It’s a relief to know that the filmmakers are thinking of their audience.
Here, I must bring up a recurring problem that is as vexing as it is common in Indian mystery-thrillers: too many twists. Too many twists. A mystery is as much about surprising the audience as it is about telling it right, without using sly means to get the intended effect. The number of twists that can be stuffed in it without making it look like a mockery is but irrelevant.
In the case of Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru, we eagerly await its conclusion where that one link connecting the three independent strands will be revealed. But, such is not the case. In fact, it comes apart when it should have soared. For in the last fifteen minutes of the film, a dozen or so twists are packed till it looks grotesque. We are not given enough time to register them, for they come rapidly, one after the other. It’s stunning, but not in a good way. Yes, there was a murder, and yes, there was a kidnapping. And an accident, too. They were all connected, as we guessed. But, nothing is as we thought it was; the film undergoes an abrupt transformation. Now we are suddenly watching a different film. Manipulating the audience by hiding crucial plot points to reveal them all in the film’s thunderous climax is a sign of a subpar imagination or just laziness.
It’s such a shame, it really is. The payoff isn’t particularly rewarding, though some who measure the greatness of a mystery by the number of twists it contains or its ability to confound them in one deceitful way or another will applaud it.
A couple of amateurish mistakes notwithstanding, there are flickers of promise in the way Naren goes about doing his job. Some moments in the film are executed with a flourish (the accident, shown aerially in slow-mo with Naak Pe Gussa playing in the background, is my favorite), something we don’t see in a debut film, something we definitely don’t see in a film directed by a twentysomething. But I just wish it didn’t succumb to the foolishness of wanting to leave the audience dazed. It was managing quite well for a while there.
(Not For Reproduction)
I find a majority of Indian mystery-thrillers a bit of a slog to sit through. They are too oversimplified for me, too sloppily plotted. If one misses a detail, they need not worry. Indian filmmakers are in the habit of including a short montage at the end where pieces of the entire mystery come together, in the chronological order, for the sake of absolute clarity. I, for one, detest this habit of theirs. Mysteries need to come together in the head; putting them together on-screen hastily at the end indicates that either they – the filmmakers – weren’t too confident of their technique – which then leads us to question why they decided to tell it the way they did in the first place – or they think the audience isn’t bright enough to figure it out themselves. It does the genre, the audience, and also themselves a great disservice.
Debutant Karthick Naren’s Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru isn’t a slog to sit through, at least not in the beginning. It’s told mostly in flashbacks by a crippled ex-cop who revisits a most puzzling case: on a rainy night some years ago, there was a murder, an accident and a kidnapping, and these three events are mysteriously connected. Naren jumps from incident to incident, from clue to clue, and his stylish approach might seem a little bewildering at first (why do we need to know at what time the clues are discovered?), but we understand why the film is structured so when it finally begins to unravel. It’s exciting to watch the suspense being cleverly amped up, but it is also worrying because Naren tries to tell too many things at once. Things are a bit jumbled, but not too. Amusingly, at one point, the ex-cop says to the new recruit, “So, tell me everything that has happened so far, in the chronological order,” and the youngster obliges. It’s a relief to know that the filmmakers are thinking of their audience.
Here, I must bring up a recurring problem that is as vexing as it is common in Indian mystery-thrillers: too many twists. Too many twists. A mystery is as much about surprising the audience as it is about telling it right, without using sly means to get the intended effect. The number of twists that can be stuffed in it without making it look like a mockery is but irrelevant.
In the case of Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru, we eagerly await its conclusion where that one link connecting the three independent strands will be revealed. But, such is not the case. In fact, it comes apart when it should have soared. For in the last fifteen minutes of the film, a dozen or so twists are packed till it looks grotesque. We are not given enough time to register them, for they come rapidly, one after the other. It’s stunning, but not in a good way. Yes, there was a murder, and yes, there was a kidnapping. And an accident, too. They were all connected, as we guessed. But, nothing is as we thought it was; the film undergoes an abrupt transformation. Now we are suddenly watching a different film. Manipulating the audience by hiding crucial plot points to reveal them all in the film’s thunderous climax is a sign of a subpar imagination or just laziness.
It’s such a shame, it really is. The payoff isn’t particularly rewarding, though some who measure the greatness of a mystery by the number of twists it contains or its ability to confound them in one deceitful way or another will applaud it.
A couple of amateurish mistakes notwithstanding, there are flickers of promise in the way Naren goes about doing his job. Some moments in the film are executed with a flourish (the accident, shown aerially in slow-mo with Naak Pe Gussa playing in the background, is my favorite), something we don’t see in a debut film, something we definitely don’t see in a film directed by a twentysomething. But I just wish it didn’t succumb to the foolishness of wanting to leave the audience dazed. It was managing quite well for a while there.
(Not For Reproduction)
