Jothi Movie Review: A shoddy, forgettable film

It seems like all it takes for directors these days to make a feature film is a newspaper clipping. This week's release, Jothi, follows suit, and is inspired by the real-life incidents of missing newborn babies. Of course, such stories have tremendous potential to become a riveting film, but the challenge is in developing this idea into a convincing screenplay. It is on this front that Jothi spectacularly falters and the amateurish making doesn't make things better either. 

Director: AV Krishna Paramatma

Cast: Vetri, Sheela Rajkumar, Saravanan

Jothi begins with constable Muthu (Elango Kumaravel) explaining to a couple of new recruits how a major case was cracked back in the day. Jothi,  a heavily-pregnant woman, is left alone at home by her gynecologist husband Ashwin (Saravanan), who has to attend an emergency. In a typical psycho-killer style, someone enters Jothi's house, performs a C-section on her, and takes away her baby. Sub-Inspector Sakthi (Vetri), who is Jothi's neighbour, lands at the crime scene and begins the investigation immediately.

Director AV Krishna Paramatma does the setting up part quite effectively. Along with the cops, the audience is also left pondering. Who would have done something so gruesome and more importantly, why? However, everything just goes downhill from there. The investigation and police procedurals are shallow with no real clever moments, which are mandatory in a mystery thriller. There are also quite a few evident red herrings, which serve nothing apart from eating up the runtime.

Usually, in investigative thrillers, the viewer feels the thrills and excitement from the lead actor's performance. However in Jothi, one doesn't feel the urgency or sense of purpose in Vetri's body language. His character is also poorly written as he hardly gets any scene to prove his efficiency. Sheela, who plays Jothi gets a meatier role, but there isn't anything remarkable about her performance either. Once again, it has got more to do with the shoddy writing and lack of finesse in making than the performance. For instance, there is a sequence where the pregnant Jothi starts dancing in anger. It's supposed to be an emotional moment but the end result is unintentionally funny. The music by Harshvardhan Rameshwar is extremely loud and raucous. It's as if the composer was instructed to amp up the emotions by filling the voids with loud background score.

Jothi is intended to be a socially relevant film that tells an important message, but the film never rises above mediocrity courtesy its amateurish writing and substandard making.