Cadaver Movie Review: Shoddy writing pulls down this technically brilliant whodunit 

Imagine eating a well-cooked dish where the spices are perfect and the seasoning is on point, but the meat unfortunately is rotten. Well, I had a similar after-taste watching Amala Paul's Cadaver. The murder mystery is tastefully made with top-notch works from Aravind Singh (cinematographer), San Lokesh (editor) and Ranjin Raj (composer). The rotten meat here is the shoddily written screenplay and story. This concoction is a really rare occurrence. With thrillers, it is usually the other way around, great ideas on
paper gets lost in translation to the screen.   

Cast: Amala Paul, Thrigun, Riythvika, Munishkanth 

Director: Anoop S Panicker 

Editor San Lokesh does a fantastic job of containing the suspense in this wafer-thin story. Though the non-linear narrative gets a bit convoluted in places, it is probably the only element holding the audience's interest till the final reveal. Aravind Singh's frames and Ranjin Raj's music complement each other in multiple instances, and the mood for the thriller is brilliantly set by the works of these two people. They don't go all gun blazing throughout either, they know when to hold back and give a breather for the audience. 

Cadaver is a story of a police surgeon trying to unmask a series of mysterious homicides and all the clues point toward a life sentence prisoner, who hasn't left his cell for years. The biggest of all loose ends in the story is the reason behind his imprisonment. Though the film divulges into multiple sub-plots, it never tries to address why a principal character is held as a prisoner. Whatever is built by the technical team is destroyed by the massive loopholes in the story.

The tracks of both Athulya and Riythvika are extremely formulaic and it gives us instant memory flashes of a dozen films which had identical characters. Their invested performance gets buried under the loads of cliches that come along with their roles. 

The other major hiccup in Cadaver is its plastic dialogues. Amala Paul had disclosed in an interview that the film was originally written to be a Malayalam feature, but it was re-written to Tamil later. This becomes evident in multiple places as the dialogues are verbose and even crucial one-liners fail to pack a punch. The film also has major tropes inspired by Malayalam films. For instance, the killer leaves clues from the Bible to hint at their next victim. This idea has been used previously in a host of other films, namely Memories (Aarathu Sinam in Tamil). 

Amala looks extremely convincing as the bold, nonchalant forensic surgeon. The way her looks and body language are styled feels very refreshing, especially among a crowd of caricatures. Only if the rest of the characters had similar invested writing, the film would have been way more engaging. 

All the whodunits conclude at the point where the prime antagonist is unmasked. But two common villains that I commonly spotted in all the recent thrillers are convenience and coincidence. All the efforts of the filmmakers and writers to build an unguessable suspense and an unsolvable case vanishes into thin air when these two villains make their entry. Cadaver is the newest film on the list to feed these beasts. And as long as these villains are on the prowl, thrillers will continue to die a death more gruesome than their characters.