Diary Movie Review - Too Many Deviations!

Ashwin Ram

Diary is a horror thriller genre flick directed by debutant Innasi Pandiyan. The film stars Arulnithi in the lead role and Fivestar Kathiresan has bankrolled the project.

Premise:

Arulnithi is a Police officer who takes up an unsolved old dacoity case as his first one. There is a specific reason for it which is revealed later, how he finishes the case successfully forms the crux of the story.

Writing/ Direction:

The opening portions are promising, that we are in for at least a decent thriller. Soon after the track switched completely, I was even doubtful whether the operator changed the movie or something. The bus episode filled almost three-fourth of the movie, it was mostly boring with no big interesting elements. Also, the main problem is there was no staging or buildup for the bus episode. Felt like random people out of nowhere were getting inside the bus one after the other and I was wondering what was going on. The situations are tasteless and sequences have no coherence. Connecting the dots and linking them at one single point is the key, but the screenplay has not been written to achieve it comfortably. The thriller to horror transition is not convincingly presented, also the film suffers to choose between the two. The team has tried to jump scare the audience in plenty of places, but the old-school ideas don’t work anymore. The actual story is revealed at the very end, until then we are left alone guessing what could possibly be the plot. Direction isn’t clever enough, lots of explanations are shown repeatedly, in spite of them being open for the viewers already. The main twist is easily predictable and it’s officially out only towards the climax, so the surprise factor is absent. The way the film ended is good, powered by a smart plot point. With a small unexpected turn in the final five minutes, the movie gains momentum, however it’s too late to be good. Cringe dialogues and melodramatic emotions let down the show further.

Performances:

Arulnithi does well in a cop role which doesn’t require him to perform that hard, also his screen space is on and off, he doesn’t appear throughout despite being the central character. Debut heroine Pavithra Marimuthu has done a decent job, however her role isn’t convincing enough, in the sense she doesn’t have much importance to impact the story. Sha Ra’s presence is surprisingly tolerable, he is comparatively less exaggerated on-screen these days, in fact a few of his one line timing comedies work here. There are countless other artists who have enough screen time, but none of them have a convincing role to play, so their performances are stale.

Technicalities:

Solid music by Ron Ethan Yohann, even though the songs don’t land well on the film, they are very decent to listen to. Background score is powerful and he has tried to elevate all the weak spots of the storytelling with some heavyweight compositions. Exotic hill locations during aerial shots and there are some pleasing frames inside the small bus space, but the day for night DI looks horrible on the big screen, along with the poor VFX quality, the film loses its believability factor. Crisp editing was very much necessary to tighten the output’s engagement, lagging scenes fill the flow to a huge extent. Clap-worthy sound effects by the team, the effort to create an impact is evident.

Bottomline - Starts and ends on a decent note. Underwhelming screenplay filled with irrelevant and long-drawn-out sequences drains out the interesting plot. Certain appealing ideas are wasted by weak storytelling.

DIARY - Too Many Deviations!

Rating: 2.5/5