Miral Movie Review

Ashwin Ram

Miral is a thriller genre film starring Bharath and Vani Bhojan in the lead roles. It is directed by a debutant named M. Sakthivel and the project is bankrolled by profound production house Axess Film Factory.

Premise:

Bharath and Vani Bhojan are married, one night, Vani Bhojan dreams of Bharath getting slashed and killed by a stranger when they are on a road trip. Shockingly, they land in a similar situation in reality. How they escape from it forms the remaining story.

Writing/ Direction:

The overall story arc is acceptable, but it is extremely thin. Less than 2 hours' duration looks calming from outside, however there should be a screenplay that should manage to hold the viewers even if it’s a short film. And, that’s a complete backfire here, each and every scene in the movie lags to a huge extent. Sequences that could be presented in less than a minute are extended for a very long time, sluggish pace is never an issue, but there should be something interesting going on right. Poor script developments as the flow is empty, till the interval block it feels the main picture hasn’t even started yet. There are some thrilling moments and jump scares once in a while, but that’s not sufficient enough to sustain the excitement. The character establishments are very basic, we don’t get to empathize with the hero’s family, I cannot even root for the little kid, so there’s zero impact when they suffer and have a hard time. Probably the director thought that he is saving the best for the last and has told a new story altogether at the very end and tried to justify. In the case of Pizza (2012), everything came together so fluently and thus it was accepted, but here it’s out of the way. It feels, the film started at one point, traveled relentlessly on a different route and ended in a way that no one saw it coming.

Performances:

Bharath delivers a subtle performance, maintaining the mood of a scene carefully. Vani Bhojan has played her part decently. KS Ravikumar has got a role in which he has been the usual himself, but the character didn’t stand tall for him to impress with his skills. Same with the proven good actor Rajkumar of NKPK fame, but his role is very weak and one-dimensionally written. There are no other noteworthy actor’s performances or characters in the film.

Technicalities:

No songs, which is a good thing for a crisp thriller. Background score is convincing, creating quite a number of moments that hold predominantly because of the music. Except for certain shots being excessively bright, the camera work was pretty neat throughout. Editing is the biggest drawback here, lags all-over and repetitive shots like the windmill, scarecrow used as scene transitions. Art direction, make up, sound effects should have been much better to provide a neater output.

Bottomline

Content-wise it is in the length of a short film, to stretch it out to a feature, screenplay requires plenty of interesting elements to engage and that is absolutely missing here.

Miral - Opportunity Misfired!

Rating: 2/ 5