Asif Ali and Aparna Balamurali start investigating a financial wrongdoing, and things get murkier as we discover there are secrets within secrets within secrets. This a film where the twists are not always very organic, but it’s still watchable. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
The tagline for Mirage is “fades as you get closer”, and this could be the tagline for almost every Jeethu Joseph thriller. You think you’re seeing something, and then you realise that that something isn’t what you think it is. Asif Ali plays Ashwin. The mirage is that he runs an online channel dedicated to fact-driven journalism. The reality is something else. Aparna Balamurali plays Abhirami, and the mirage is that she is a financial consultant who falls for a man in the same company. The reality is something else. Hakim Shahjahan plays Kiran, the man Abhirami is in love with. In the opening scenes, the mirage is that he dies in a train accident. The reality – as shown in flashbacks – is something else. Hannah Reji Koshy plays Abhirami’s friend and colleague, Ritika. She, too, is a mirage – she has another reality. In the director’s finest films, the twists and misdirections – that is, the mirages – are so organic that the storytelling sucks you in. If you expect that quality in Mirage… well, the reality is something else.
The plot opens with Abhirami’s boss discovering that very important financial data has been leaked. He wants to know who did this, and this sets off a series of investigations and chases that begins to involve all the characters. And as the detective work continues, the narrative goes back and forth. In the present day, we have the search for the disk containing the financial data. And we keep switching to the past, where we get to discover the reality behind these people and these happenings. For instance, Abhirami says that Kiran has never gone anywhere without telling her. She is, thus, confused that he took a train to some strange place and ended up dead. But as we go deeper into her character and her story, we learn that Abhirami’s life is filled with so many twists and turns that we laugh when a cop (played by Sampath) looks at her and says: “No more secrets.” But of course there are many more secrets!
Till the twists start piling up, Mirage has a Hitchcockian tone, with deliciously old-style touches like a big, fat key that’s found in the hidden compartment of an office desk. But there’s another thing that’s old-school, which does not work – and that’s the overly expository dialogue that resembles lines from a radio play that describe a lot of what we are already seeing. It is to the credit of the performers that this talkiness does not derail the movie. But slowly, as the twists take over, we see that they are contrived for shock value. There’s intrigue in Mirage but very little suspense. You know the twists are coming. But they remain twists for the sake of twists. Some of the events are unintentionally funny, like a character who specialises in getting hit at the back of his head. This is also the kind of movie where you want to kill two people, and you have cans of kerosene instantly at hand so you can burn down the house they are in. But all said, junk food is food, too. I had quite a bit of fun, though I must say I’d rather have been biting my nails
