Ashok Selvan and Preity Mukhundhan play Surya and Iyal, a couple slogging away at routine day jobs. They dream of opening a homestay, and soon enough, they find the ideal place. But now, the local MLA becomes an enemy and the so-far light and romantic drama turns into a blood-soaked home-invasion thriller. Ashok Selvan is good, but this couple deserved better love scenes. Their chemistry is put to better use when they are fighting to save their dream. That’s the basic storyline and the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain a few minor spoilers.
R Kaarthikeyan’s Anbil Avan is based on a story credited to Vignesh Raja, with additional writing from the director and Ashok Selvan. They cook up a solid and very relatable scenario. We all have dreams when we are young. But sometimes – or perhaps most of the time – real life has a way of postponing those dreams. Because of rent and EMIs and worries about safety and security, we jump into routine, soul-sucking jobs, and soon, the dream becomes a distant memory. One day, Surya decides he has had enough. He says, “Vela vela nu odikitte irukkom… eppa dhaan vaazhuradhu!” He decides to go after their dream of opening a homestay. Surya and Iyal find a great property in the hills. They take loans and think everything is sorted, but they don’t take into account the local MLA, played by Kadirbalu. He begins to harass them for reasons that slowly become clear.
And slowly, Anbil Avan becomes yet another movie with an interesting premise that needed much better writing and staging and acting. Ashok Selvan gives one of his most committed performances. At times, it appears that he truly believes in this material. But almost everyone around him is going through the motions, and who can blame them! They have nothing to play other than the most templated emotions. The MLA, for instance, is “evil”. A cop is “lusty”. At least Iyal had some potential. She is a rich girl who cut off ties with her family to marry Surya, and this does give rise to conflict. But this conflict is so broadly written and the dialogues are generally so generic that Surya and Iyal feel more like constructs than like real people. There’s another interesting aspect about Iyal. She prefers to go to the police even when common sense may say that this will trigger the bad guys even more. But again, this trait does not translate into something useful for the screenplay.
The love portions look like they’ve been written by watching love scenes in other films rather than experiencing love in real life. We get a shooting star scene. We get a scene where an angry Surya smashes a mirror. Being “cinematic” is not the worst of crimes – but none of this is convincing. Why does the owner of the property give it to Surya when she has been adamant about not selling? How does a couple from the city with no combat experience fight off dozens of goons when the movie transforms into a home-invasion scenario? The same question was answered convincingly in Amal Neerad’s Varathan. You believed what was happening. Here, you don’t. But yes, the action bits are better. Cinematographer Gowtham Rajendran makes good use of the tight spaces within the home, and as standalone scenes where people hack away at each other, these are the best parts of Anbil Avan.
But this is a bit like saying the comedy track in an older movie was good. We want the whole movie to be good. The basic issue with Anbil Avan is that it tries to be “mass” in a classy way. At one point, Surya tells Iyal, “Sanda poda porom”. At another point, Surya ends up outwitting the MLA when cops raid his house. And later, Surya outwits the MLA when he signs over the papers of his house. All of this is staged in a way that is supposed to make us go, “Damn, I didn’t see that coming!” But no one is surprised. Also, did the film need to be so long? In this kind of thriller, do we really need the flashback scenes that show Surya and Iyal before marriage? So yes, you can argue that Surya was a daredevil once, and it is these qualities that help him now during the home invasion. But surely jumping off a cliff into a river is not the same as facing dozens of hardened criminals with guns and knives! Sometimes, you feel that the word “generic” was coined just to describe most of our movies!
