Jayaram and Urvashi play a couple that gets involved in a ‘Drishyam’-like murder. For a while, the film looks like a spoof. Then, it gets all serious on us and becomes a PSA about the horrors of drugs. The result is a random mess that just cannot decide what kind of movie it wants to be. That’s the quick review. A more detailed analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Pandiraaj usually likes to make films about large, extended families. In Parimala and Co, he zooms in on a single nuclear unit: a father, a mother, and their two daughters. Jayaram plays Parimala, his frequent co-star Urvashi plays Sudhandhiram, Sanjana Krishnamoorthy and Ananthika Sanilkumar play the daughters, Sakthi and Madhu. If this family unit reminds you of Georgekutty’s family in Drishyam, it’s no accident. This film’s story is a what-if on the Jeethu Joseph blockbuster. What if a creepy stalker-like young man ends up dead, like in Drishyam, but no one in the family knows who did it? What if the father thought the mother did it, the mother thought the older daughter did it, and the older daughter thought that her sister did it? And you wonder where Pandiraaj is going with this. Is he spoofing Drishyam and giving us a comedy? Is that why he cast veterans of comedy like Urvashi and Jayaram?
Or is the director stepping out of his comfort zone and trying to make a thriller that’s a variation on one of Indian cinema’s most legendary thrillers? So the victim’s angry and grief-stricken mother becomes a variation on the policewoman that Asha Sharath played. She’s determined to find out what happened to her son. The number of characters slowly increases. Mysskin appears as a policeman who investigates the case. Sakthi gets a boyfriend. Madhu gets a twist with regard to the victim. We thought he was stalking her, but it turns out she has some secrets of her own. The victim himself appears to have had another relationship. Meanwhile, the family is threatened by a series of ransom notes. In the middle of all this, Pandiraaj doesn’t want to let go of the middle-class flavour that have made his films so popular. We get a scene set during Deepavali where Parimala does not buy fireworks but instead takes his family to the terrace, so that they can think that the fireworks being set off by other people are actually their own. Another “middle-class” stretch revolves around the death of Parimala’s sister.
The result is utter confusion. A cop working under Mysskin remarks that the investigation is moving very slowly. The same can be said about the film. It’s not just the pace that’s the problem, it’s also the randomness. Scenes seem to have been written with no regard for what happened earlier or what’s to come later. And there’s no cleverness, which is the backbone of any thriller. The reveal of the person behind the ransom notes, for instance, is so ridiculous that you wonder about the fact that the actors even agreed to perform this scene. Almost everyone in the cast is underused, because the writing doesn’t hold up and it doesn’t give anyone anything to do. And making things worse is a drug subplot, with a message about how cocaine addiction is harming our country’s youngsters. Pandiraaj’s previous outing was Thalaivan Thalaivii. I am not the biggest fan of that loud film, but at least it stuck to a single premise and kept building on it. Parimala and Co is clueless about what to do with its premise. It fumbles around till the end, with no major laughs and no major thrills. Instead, we get little plot points like a young woman who has wine because her complexion will get brighter. The real victim is the audience.
