Ring Ring Movie Review: This comedy-drama fails to leverage the strengths of its premise

While it is understandable to be inspired by other industry films, it is important to root the story in order to avoid alienation. Sakthivel's Ring Ring seems to struggle in this regard. The film borrows heavily from Khel Khel Mein (2024), which is an official remake of the 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers. The original film follows a group of friends who play a dare where they place all of their phones on the table and agree to publicly read out every message and listen to every call. Director Mudassar Aziz would have set this story up at a wedding where friends meet after quite some time, with the wedding being a subplot. The Akshay Kumar starrer grounds the story to the Indian context, by showing how there is excessive pressure to save marriages.

In Ring Ring, childhood friends gather for a birthday celebration after a long time with their partners and decide to play the game. How it affects their relationships after this game is what Ring Ring is about. The biggest strength of the story is that it reveals details about the lives of the characters and their relationships with each other in a short span of time, in a contained setting. In Khel Khel Mein, the suspense of whether Akshay's Rishab is truthful or not is maintained throughout the film, cleverly employing the character's profession as a plastic surgeon. However, in Ring Ring, Vivek Prasanna's Thiyagu lacks such a nuance. This is the case with all the other characters. The messages and calls that they receive during this game should have potentially been landmines. But all of this information comes in the form of bland expositions at the very beginning, effectively making this game redundant. The expositions did not add value to the humour front as well.

Director: Sakthivel
Cast: Vivek Prasanna, Swayam Siddha, Danny Annie Pope, Sakshi Agarwal

Unlike the films Ring Ring drew inspiration from, the friends don't plan to play the game but it happens by chance, which looks forced. The core of the story is whether a character's love is strong enough to withstand uncomfortable secrets. Sakthivel's Ring Ring misses that as well. Danny Annie Pope's Kathir, who seems to have cheated on his partner, buries the hatchet with her when the girl he cheated with says, "Night full-a un girlfriend pathiye pesi neeyum thoongala ennayum thoonga vidala." Such writing choices seem convenient.

Ring Ring fails to set the stakes high enough to create tension by threatening to jeopardise a functional marriage. But Thiyagu and Swayam (Swayam Siddha) are already a quarrelsome couple. Why they stopped getting along with each other remains unclear. We aren't shown anything good, at least not enough, in these relationships for us to empathise with and root for a couple to stay together. As a spillover effect, these characters do not get decent emotional arcs and that gives actors less to work on.

Ring Ring, in short, is made without being aware of the opportunities the premise offers. The film that needed to have an equal amount of humour, guilt, remorse and emotional reconciliations does not tick any boxes due to the lack of this self-awareness.