You’ll be able to’t take your eyes off Fahadh Fassil if you see him up on the display screen; very similar to he can’t when he sees a meaty function in sight. Thondimuthalum Dhriksakshiyum was the primary time I laid eyes on him and immediately fell in love. He performed a convincing, conniving but overtly endearing thief who wouldn’t maintain himself to a set parameter in your head. In “Maareesen”, he performs a low-lying thief once more, solely this time he doesn’t have Dileesh Pothan to layer his act in a lot context that you are certain to be captivated by him.
Right here, he performs Dhayalan a.okay.a Dhaya, a lately launched from jail petty thief who immediately goes again to his roots. It’s as if stealing is a type of second life for him, and the religious connection to it someway leads him to a bike, and ultimately, a home that he feels is asking out to be robbed. Nevertheless, the home leads him to Velayudham (performed by veteran actor Vadivelu), a barely older gentleman who’s chained to a random wall in the home and claims that his son typically does that to him as a result of he has Alzheimer’s and may get simply misplaced if left alone.
Now, that is an fascinating conjecture in the movie. Velayudham guarantees Dhaya that if he’s close to the ATM, he’ll bear in mind his PIN and provides Dhaya the cash he’s searching for, supplied he releases him from the chains. With nothing to lose besides main this previous man to a path that would possibly by no means lead him house, Dhaya releases him, and Velayudham offers him the cash. However Dhaya’s grasping thoughts, which now is aware of that the previous man is loaded and infrequently confuses him for his son, tries to stay round with him for so long as it takes for him to get the PIN from Velayudham.
The plot, which is basically one lengthy journey on Dhaya’s stolen bike, takes this unlikely duo on criss-crossing paths of confusion and self-realization. Since reminiscence will not be Velayudham’s biggest asset, the normally impatient Dhaya decides that he’ll take him wherever he needs to go, after all, to get cash out of him initially, however later as a result of one thing in him shifts. Or at the least the filmmakers wish to consider that it does.
“Maareesen” retains toying with the concept of morality, with a morally gray character and one other character so rigged in thriller that his recurring reminiscence lapses and relapses reveal one thing or the opposite that we considered him to be true or false. Sudheesh Sankar makes use of Fafa’s character as a lens to unveil the plot’s extra twisted turns. The viewers is thus in Dhaya’s standpoint for many of the movie. Up till the interval block, Sankar someway manages to maintain you hooked in the black comedic turns that this journey to Thirumalai provides, however two nice actors can solely achieve this a lot heavy lifting. These characters are not layered sufficient for the narrative’s eventual disclose to fall into place. It additionally doesn’t assist that the plot rapidly dissolves into so many alternative problematic territories that it’s laborious to maintain up with which one ultimately breaks the movie aside.
“Maareesen,” with out spoiling it a lot, manages to single-handedly acceptable the trauma and abuse inflicted on girls and use a illness to merely pivot the narrative to vigilante justice. It turns into much more problematic if you notice that Shankar was allegedly called out for misconduct on his set not way back by a lady. A plot twist that makes use of abuse as a technique of development, with out grounding it in an intelligently written or layered reveal — much like what “Maharaja” did in 2024 — feels rudimentary and unearned.
It additionally doesn’t assist that a lot of the movie goes round in circles, chewing into the plot’s already bloated runtime. Each Fahad Fassil and Vadivelu slowly exhaust the probabilities of how they’ll make us look after these characters as a result of the movie’s writing doesn’t enable them that bandwidth. What’s left is a thriller that doesn’t work, regardless of displaying preliminary promise.
