Maareesan Movie Review:

Right around the interval mark, Maareesan takes the sharpest and most abrupt ninety-degree turn in terms of tone and genre, in Tamil cinema history. It feels like a crass thing to do: to divide the film into two equal halves and talk about them as separate entities with distinct characteristics. I believe films are a whole and should be viewed as such. But it's almost impossible to ignore the whiplash Maareesan subjects you to, before launching into the second half. And that still could have turned into a fun experiment. Instead, what we get is an unshakeable feeling that everything that follows a soulfully engaging first half is nothing short of deliberate sabotage. A cursive handwritten note with exquisite penmanship suddenly trails off into crayon scribbles written with the non-dominant hand.

Director: Sudheesh Sankar

Cast: Vadivelu, Fahadh Faasil, Kovai Sarala, Vivek Prasanna

As the genre shift happens around the interval, and you're unaware of the boundaries it would push, you wait in anticipation, excited, because the film does earn your trust by then. So, you stay curious as the film takes off smoothly into white puffy clouds of a 'wholesome road trip where an Alzheimer's patient and a thief somehow bond, share life altering wisdom and become better people,’ to then suddenly plunging into the dark icy depth of 'a crime thriller about a vigilante who targets a ring of sex offenders and the film is now a (Kind of, but not really) revenge story'. Oh, I thought I was in an aeroplane, but I guess it's a submarine and we're riding into the ocean now. That's not too bad, you think to yourself, until you realise that the submarine is diving into a shallow pond and not the ocean. Taking a leaf out of the film's treatment, I suddenly feel compelled to take a jolting turn from criticisms and talk about everything the film did right. And the bulk of it is entirely within its first half and revolves around the characters, Velayudham Pillai (Vadivelu) and Dhayalan (Fahadh Faasil).

This is not the first time we have seen Vadivelu in a full-fledged non-comedic role, and certainly not the last time anybody is going to talk about the actor’s seismic impact on Tamil pop culture. What is still surprising is how celebrated and yet unexplored his acting range is. Both in Maamannan and Maareesan, there are instances where Vadivelu breaks down after a moment of abject powerlessness, with similar emotions but wildly different reasons behind them. And yet, you don’t see traces of his earlier characters. Sometimes, there is no Maamannan, Velayudham, or even Vadivelu, but just a man conveying a feeling authentic enough that it even crosses the context of a functional scene to move you. From world view to general countenance, there is a stark difference in characterisation between Dhayalan and Velayudham, and it is wonderfully accentuated by Fahadh’s nonchalance. He could have played the well-established ‘charming scammer’ trope for this role and gotten away with it, but he never does. The actor achieves more by doing less and walks away with your respect. 

While it hardly matches up to the standards previously established, the second half is not entirely without its merits. The crime thriller portions of the story felt like a competent half of an entirely different film. They just come across as aberrations when they attach themselves to characters we grew fond of (Velayudham and Dhayalan) and mutate them into someone else.  Also, Maareesan deserves appreciation for abstaining from disturbing visual depictions of sexual violence to hammer home its darkness. Although handled with sincerity, the sexual violence that motivates the string of crimes still feels like a lazy writing choice to create irredeemable villains and an easy-to-root-for hero. 

The most tragic thing about Maareesan is how you can see a much better film right beneath the surface. It is especially apparent during the moments when Velayudham’s internal struggle spills out through philosophical musings. There is a poignant reflection on how our sense of self is just a string of memories. In another scene, Dhayalan remarks how loss of memory could be a blessing, while Velayudham adds how the disease has forced him to let go of the past and future and made him live in the present. Maareesan could have explored such grand and rich philosophical themes through two unlikely travellers bonding over a road trip. But, no, it settles for a simplistic crime thriller that ends with an angst-ridden “solution” for a sensitive real-world issue. 

Maareesan is pregnant with premises of two perfectly engaging yet tonally different films, which could have worked on their own. The unfortunate chimera we did end up with serves only to show what happens when filmmaking overpowers storytelling, when the need to accentuate drama, the fixation on conforming to screenplay structures, and the hyper-awareness of genre tropes all come in the way of a story. Instead of forcing Velayudham and Dhayalan to go down a path of crime and mystery, the film should have let us follow them on a journey of self-discovery, without a map, like all good road trips.