The film is a road movie and a social-justice thriller. At a conceptual level, it’s certainly interesting. But the execution is a letdown. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Sudheesh Sankar and his writer V Krishna Moorthy are nothing if not ambitious. Their film Maareesan begins like a quirky Malayalam buddy movie. Fahadh Faasil plays a thief named Dhaya. He is released from prison in Palayamkottai, but he has no plans to reform. He steals a phone, a bike, and then he stops in front of a big house. He feels something, as though the place is calling out to him. He breaks in and runs into Velayudham, played by Vadivelu. The man has Alzheimer’s, and he says his son has kept him under lock and key. He looks at Dhaya as a means of escape. Dhaya looks at this man as a means of making money. (He has an ATM card.) And off they go, into what we think is a road movie. We think they will bond over their differences, or that the older man will teach the younger one some valuable life lessons.
And that does seem to be the first half, with the help of an upbeat Yuvan Shankar Raja score. Velayudham talks about watching films as a kid, without his father finding out. Dhaya talks about his childhood, recalling a time he wanted shoes. The actors gel well. Vadivelu expands on the submissiveness he showed in Maamannan. Here, too, he is oppressed – but by a vanishing memory. Velayudham tells Dhayalan that life is made up of memories, and there’s nothing as terrible as losing your mind slowly. Fahadh, too, does something interesting. He gives us a mellower version of the villain he played in Maamannan. As Dhaya tells his friend (Vivek Prasanna), he is not a good man, but he is not a terribly evil man, either. He desperately wants Velayudham’s ATM PIN. He desperately wants the man’s money. But as we discover later, he does have a strong moral core.
But once the basic equation between the men is established, the screenplay seems stuck in the same zone. There isn’t anything particularly emotional or funny or weird. We get odd bits like the fact that Velayudham does not believe in God. Then, out of nowhere, we get to know about a series of murders, with Kovai Sarala as the cop on the case. We get a heavy-duty metaphor about a snake and a rat. And the gentle, ambling road movie becomes a thriller involving a major issue. In theory, I am all for genre shifts, but this isn’t done very well here. The second half turns into a typical Tamil movie, with a flashback and a vigilante on the loose. There are good ideas here and there, but there is also the sense of time being wasted. Many scenes go on for too long, and there are too many coincidences, including the big twist at the end about the identity of a criminal.
There is a nice throwaway bit where Dhaya takes Velyudham to meet his mother. There is a heart-warming payoff involving a sum of money. But more interestingly, there is another coincidence there, involving a date, and I began to wonder if the film wants us to think that destiny brought these two men together. Is that why Dhaya said early on that he felt that that particular house was calling out to him, the house where he found Velayudham? But if that’s the case, it’s certainly not fleshed out convincingly. And the blatant social messaging that follows feels like empty lip service. Maareesan is a clever title. It’s the name of the asura from the Ramayana, who disguised himself as a golden deer. And one of the central themes of this movie is that some people aren’t who you think they are. But you wish the rest of the movie had been as consistently clever.
