Thrayam Review | A Shoddy Hyper-Linking Thriller That Can Mess With Your Temper

The movie Thrayam starts with the iconic quote by Quentin Tarantino – I didn’t go to film school. I went to films. And then there is one more quote from Udhayabhanu, the lead character of Udhayananu Thaaram. The movie here was so outdated that you might wonder which one was the last film the, Sanjith Chandrasenan, the director of Thrayam watched. The concept was so bland that you might feel like telling them that going to a film school is not a bad idea. With a cluttered screenplay making you see the mediocre visuals again and again because of its structure, Thrayam is not even offering unintentional comedy.

So, the movie is staged as this intercrossing of paths between a handful of people. There is a boy gang who are extorting money from a young girl to live a chilled-out life because they have visuals of her intimate video. Then, there is another girl, Elsa, who is trying to extort money from men by blackmailing them with their private photos and videos. In the midst of all this, there is another hawala dealer. How the paths of all these people crossed paths over a night and what all transpired is what you see in Thrayam.

When the movie reaches the interval point, we have this scene where Aju Varghese, who plays the role of an autorickshaw driver, asks his passenger, who is a scriptwriter, about his next film. The writer replies, I have written a script about multiple events happening in one night, and the script is looking good till the interval. To which Aju Varghese’s character replies that if it is good till the interval, it will become a great one at the end. I really envy the confidence of the director, writer, and editor of Thrayam. I mean, to keep that scene in the film after watching the whole movie, you need a different level of self-confidence. Criticisms just can’t break these kinds of individuals.

When that new wave of filmmaking came to Malayalam cinema around 2010, we witnessed many stories that tried this hyper-linking parallel narrative screenplays. The thing with this script written by Arun K Gopinath is that he has written it as if the audience is seeing something like this for the first time. The characters they have built and the equations and backstories look pretty amateurish. None of the characters are doing a sensible thing in these situations, and rather than us feeling they might have done that due to circumstances, it feels more like the script forced them to do that in order to get the desired drama. Ignoring CCTV, placing the gun near a dead body, putting a dead body inside the car’s trunk, and the list goes on. The technical quality of the movie is very much on the mediocre side.

The performances are also on the shoddier side, largely because the writing support is really feeble. Dhyan Sreenivasan, as Ashiq, seems to be clueless about his character and his situation, and looking at his interviews, that might well be true. Sunny Wayne, who is rarely seen these days, gets a role that demands nothing significantly from him. The boy gang featuring Niranjan, Dain Davis, and Karthik Ramakrishnan are doing overacting in every frame. To balance out the over-acting of these folks, we have Preethy Gino playing the role of Elsa with the least amount of expressions. There are a lot of one-scene and two-scene characters performed by popular actors just to increase the poster value.

The duration of Thrayam is below two hours, and still, I found myself looking at the watch multiple times. The atrociously bad writing tests your patience by delivering badly executed scenes back to back. The quality of the scenes is so bad in terms of staging and performance that when they make you see the same accident multiple times without even changing the camera angle, it becomes an exhausting experience for the viewer.