Vishnu Vishal plays a cop on the trail of a serial killer who seems to be dead. Then how are the killings happening? The setup is great, but the writing and filmmaking make it hard to care about anything. That’s the short take. A longer review follows and it may contain spoilers.
Of late, the toughest part of writing reviews has been finding new ways of saying “great plot, middling execution”. Even about a decade ago, this was not the case. Most middling movies turned out to be middling because the plot (or premise) itself was middling. Writers and directors just did not think enough – or maybe, before the OTT days, even we did not demand enough. Maybe we were content with generically entertaining films. But now, filmmakers know they have to give their best shot, and truly, the one-lines, the plots, the premises have become much more unique. I can see Vishnu Vishal and Selvaraghavan, the protagonist and antagonist, hearing the outline of Aaryan and going “wow”! A serial killer who may not be alive? Wow! But like most films, the problem comes when the one-line is fleshed out into a full-length film. Aaryan is yet another case of… great plot, middling execution.
It’s a clever title, and it ties in with the serial killer’s motivation. Praveen K, the director, is ambitious. He opens the film with a quote by Sun Tzu: “All warfare is based on deception.” And the deception starts when the Selvaraghavan character gets the story going inside the studio floor of a TV station. A show is being recorded live. But this is also where Aaryan begins to show its limitations. Cinematographer Harish Kannan does some good work in this stretch and throughout the film. But the staging feels off, the reaction shots and the performances feel off, the edits feel off. There’s no sense of atmosphere. All we get is the mechanical feel of a bunch of things happening. There’s no shock, no suspense, and poor Ghibran works overtime to cover up the problem areas with a background score that just won’t stop.
And the questions begin. Why does a random film star get shot? Why doesn’t the TV anchor played by Shraddha Srinath get anything much to do? When an officer describes the cop played by Vishnu Vishal as a workaholic, why does this cop need a personal side? And even if you want to flesh out this cop, why have that old trope of a dysfunctional marriage? Why do we need a song about his happy days with his wife when this wife has no role to play in the movie? Why do angry people in films always break something made of glass? Why do we still have to introduce a hero with a slo-mo action scene? Why do we need some random rowdy chasing our hero just to give us more random action scenes that have no connection to the plot? Why isn’t there a single moment of something going wrong in the killer’s plans due to the unpredictability of life?
We hope that at least some of these questions will eventually find answers, along with our other questions about how the serial killer chooses his victims and what connects these unlucky souls. In a way, Aaryan is an anti-Shankar movie. In the classic Shankar template, the vigilante is a glorified serial killer. He is a man who sends a message to society by murdering powerful and corrupt people. And like all serial killers, this vigilante has his own reasons and justifications. Aaryan goes in the opposite direction, which (again) is super-interesting as a concept. The film also reminded me of AR Raghavendra’s Mayakoothu from earlier this year, where a novelist confronts his characters as they come alive. But the writing has a rambling quality and it doesn’t bring all these ideas together. The toughest part of Aaryan is the message at the end, which just goes on and on. What gets serial-killed is a fantastic premise.
