Director: Sandeep Shyam
Cast: Ashok Selvan, Iswarya Menon, Janani Iyer
Vezham marks Sandeep Shyam’s directorial debut in Tamil cinema. It is in essence a revenge saga, but as the story unfolds, we find it has more layers than is first obvious to the eye.
The set up is simple enough. There’s a serial killer on the loose in and around Ooty who’s been brutally murdering innocent citizens. It so happens that Ashok (Ashok Selvan) and his girlfriend Leena (Iswarya Menon) end up being one of the killer’s targets. They are ambushed in a lonely forest area where a fight ensues between Ashok and the killer. While Leena loses her life, Ashok survives. Ashok doesn’t manage to catch a glimpse of the killer’s face, but the killer’s voice is registered in his mind. As the police fail to make arrests, Ashok, traumatized by this incident, becomes obsessed with identifying the man behind the voice and avenging his girlfriend’s death.
Let me first start with the things I liked about Vezham. While the initial scenes tease you into believing this would be a regular whodunnit or a police procedural, the director’s treatment of the narration, or at least his ideas, are refreshing. Vezham is as much a character study of a man whose demeanor has undergone a complete transformation on account of the tragedy in his life. In the flashback, we see Ashok Selvan as the young, dashing romantic who seems to have found the love of his life. In the scenes that are set in the present, we see a brooding, bearded Ashok who has lost his smile in the five years since his girlfriend’s murder. He has now become a borderline maniac. As the story unfolds, there are little revelations that peel off the layers around the murders we assumed were straightforward. We soon realize these murders are linked in a different way than we first imagined. The rest of the film is about whether Ashok, with the help of his friend Francis (a cop), manages to solve the riddle of these murders.
Its always a problem in films that are marketed as thrillers when the romantic portions actually work better than the investigative ones. I genuinely liked the romantic flashback sequence between Ashok and Leena and I thought Ashok Selvan and Iswarya Menon shared terrific on-screen chemistry. The same can also be said about the scenes that play out in the present between Ashok Selvan’s and Janani Iyer’s characters (a throwback to their smash hit Thegidi). The investigative scenes on the other hand had some nice ideas around them that were not always translated well on to the screen. The writers seem to have had a misconception that there needed to be twist after twist after twist for a film to work in this genre. This is not the case. What’s more important is for a film to be slick and sharp. Even if it is decided to introduce multiple twists, these have to be presented with utmost clarity and at the right tempo. Vezham suffers a bit from this, especially towards the end, where there seems to be an information overload. For a film that aims to be a murder mystery, such an information overload only ends up becoming an overkill for the audience.
Overall rating: 2.5/5
