Dejavu Movie Review: Logic goes for a toss in this rudderless thriller

Debutant Arvindh Srinivasan's Dejavu has an impressive start. A drunk novelist with supposed ESP (Extra Sensory Power) to predict crime scenes, pens a page describing a young girl's kidnap and his fiction turns out to be reality the next day. His predictions are so accurate that he even gets the vehicle numbers of the suspects right, even before they board into one. Though the writer's prediction game is initially fun, the film needed an equally interesting investigation track to keep the momentum going. But, sadly it doesn't. It actually does the opposite, the cumbersome investigation turns the tables and the one predicting the forthcoming event is the audience, not the writer in the story.

Cast: Arulnithi, Madhoo, Achyuth Kumar, Kali Venkat, Smruthi Venkat
Director: Arvindh Srinivasan

It is disappointing that the scenes which manage to escape this predictability are the ones where logic goes for a toss and the audience is taken for granted. In an attempt to make the twists unguessable Arvindh sabotages the little he had built till then by making his leads react in unusual ways and take the oddest decisions. For instance, in an ideal world, the writer would have been taken into custody within hours and the secret behind the ESP would be out in minutes. But here the DGP appoints a dull PC to overview the writer as he happily pens the crime scenes, sipping a glass of booze.

The penultimate reveals towards the end of the whodunit, makes us wonder more about 'Whys' and 'hows'. And the tool the filmmaker uses to drop these reveals is monologues! Almost every main character goes on a confession spree as if they were waiting for their turn in a queue.  Had the filmmaker opted to show things visually instead of making his characters recite them, the damage would have been considerably dampened.

Achyuth Kumar and Arulnithi's invested performances and Ghibran's terrific score are perhaps the only elements that keep us invested in this unengaging ride. Casting a limited actor like Madhoo in a role with layers does take an extra toll on the overall film.

For those unaware, Dejavu was shot parallel in Telugu as Repeat, starring Naveen Chandra in Arulnithi's role. Sadly, significant chunks of the Telugu portion have been retained for the Tamil version too. This only adds more to the misery.

Dejavu has been titled so to denote the series of events that repeat themselves after a year, exactly on the same day. But the abysmal screenplay and staging of the film give us the Deja Vu of a dozen woeful thrillers that we remember for all the wrong reasons.