Adrishyam Review | A Convoluted Mess With an Insufferable Flashback

In the first act of the movie Adrishyam, you get a feeling that we are dealing with two parallel investigations with certain common links. But by the time it reaches midway, the plot somewhat exposes everything it has. The second half is a massive load of backstory that is incredibly difficult to feel coherent. With cliched drama and pointless humor ruining a routine thriller, Adrishyam is a movie that runs out of fuel around the interval point.

Detective Nandha is given an assignment by ACP Purushothaman to find a girl who has been missing for a few days. A suspended police officer named Rajkumar was the one who gave the necessary information to Nandha and his team. In the meantime, a man named Sethu was doing a private investigation into Purushothaman. We see how these parallel investigations are connected and what the motives were for all these in Adrishyam.

The movie has a Tamil version titled Yugi; hence the dubbing and choice of language for certain characters is a bit of a mess. Those issues are actually very inconsequential, considering the flaws in the writing of this thriller. Written by director Zac Harriss based on a story by Packiaraj Ramalingam, the scripting tropes are highly outdated. Almost everything they have added in the backstory feels like a desperate attempt to create some unimaginable links. Almost every suspense idea we have seen in the last two decades is squeezed inside the movie’s third act, which goes on and on with an elaborate flashback segment.

Narain’s performance as Nandha is a bit loud in certain areas, and his pain never looks like an internalized trauma. Joju George gets a cakewalk character that just demands his signature swagger. Sharaf U Dheen, as Rajkumar, occasionally feels like a misfit as the drama he uses in his performance isn’t in sync with the movie’s drama. Anandhi, as Karthika, gets this always-crying, caring partner character. Both Athmeeya Rajan and Pavithra Lakshmi have pretty much nothing to do in this film.

Instead of giving the movie a fresh outlook, Zac Harriss is trying to make it look like an amalgamation of familiar ingredients. The indifferent nature of Rajkumar, the dispute between Nandha and Rajkumar over silly things, etc., spoils the thriller aspect of the movie as it gives away a lot of things. And as I already mentioned, the flashback that elaborately explains the master plan of one character feels like an insult to your intelligence rather than creating a wow factor. After all that load of backstories, when they suddenly showed Joju George on screen, it was almost like seeing someone after a long time. If creating too much confusion for the audience was done on purpose, then I must say that it was a brilliantly executed terrible decision.

Adrishyam is a convoluted mess that uses its unnecessarily complicated narrative structure as a facade to look like an intriguing thriller. Editor Ashish Joseph who decided to make the main track difficult for the viewer, should have shown some mercy by chopping off some of those lame comedy sequences.