Siren Review - Half-Baked Thriller

Ashwin Ram

Premise: Jayam Ravi is a prisoner who comes out in Parole as his father is on the death bed. After a series of events, he becomes the prime suspect for two murders. How the case unravels is the remaining story.

Writing/ Direction: The base story is a simplistic revenge saga, which is overly complicated by touching various angles and in the process it compresses everything, so all we get to see is a watered down version of a flick with a solid intent. The Viswasam style core emotion is very motivating to develop, some traces of the sentiment works too, but only on the writing level, the on-screen implementation lands lukewarm amidst the other topics. The flashback is crisp, unfortunately tries to tick way too many boxes within the short span like establishing the character of the hero’s love interest, explain the crime world of the villains, forcefully stress on the caste discrimination subject and what not. The present timeline is more of a screenplay narrative which has its own ups and downs. The good thing is that it was not boring despite the sluggish pace and there were some brisk moments in the flow, the well-researched smart murder techniques for example, but there are plenty of acquaintance characters and extra layers to the familiar storytelling pattern that hardly add any value to the tension. If the situations had more depth and if the sequences were linear with stronger impact, this would have become an intriguing game. The clumsy presentation starts to bother right from the staging till the closure. All the elements to attract a commercial moviegoer exists, but not in the perfect proportion.

Performances: Jayam Ravi has done complete justice to his character in both the timelines, his presence in the aged portions is believable. Anupama Parameswaran has played her meaty role well by shining in the montages. Keerthy Suresh felt like a miscast, someone more powerful would have fitted the shoes of a cop, her scenes were quite interesting, the dialogue modulation and delivery style became the major disappointing factors. Yogi Babu gets the job right by being a sense of relief, and offers a few genuinely laughable jokes. Azhagam Perumal, Ajay and Samuthirakani who played the bad guys were fine, but their characters failed to create any tension mainly because the crimes they committed weren’t coherently formed while showcasing the backstory.

Technicalities: Poor work by GV Prakash in terms of songs. Sam CS' background score is no exception as the film is traveling on one side and his music on the pole opposite. Neat camera work, the cinematographer has contributed his best to help the director achieve his vision for the visual storytelling. Editor Ruben has done over duty here by spoon feeding everything, his choice of shot insertions to make the scenes interesting has actually drained them down, the overall edit pattern is cluttered for no reason. Top quality stunt choreography, the fight and chase sequences are impressively executed.

Bottomline

If one moment is enjoyable, the one right after is a dud and the pattern follows almost throughout the whole movie. Engaging to an extent, but the lengthy, also predictable screenplay never allows us to be invested in the happenings.

Rating - 2.5/ 5