Sorgavaasal Review | An Enticing Premise That Needed Fine-Tuning in Its Treatment

Sorgavaasal, the latest RJ Balaji starrer, which has him playing a lead role in a “serious” film for the first time, has a very enticing premise. Sidharth Vishwanath, the director of the movie, wants to build a world of grey-shaded people against the backdrop of a riot happening inside a central prison. And he uses the conventional way of building an elaborate story filled with characters. While some of the emotional arcs and character traits in the movie are really promising, the culmination of all these varieties of scripting tropes is not getting the cinematic high. Thus, the end result of this movie feels like an unrefined attempt at something that could have been a compelling classic.

The film is set against the backdrop of a riot that happened inside Madras Central Prison back in 1999, which resulted in the death of several prisoners and a few policemen on duty. After the riot, the government employed an inquiry commission to find out what really happened in the jail at that time. What we see are the narrations of what happened during that time from the mouths of the remaining witnesses of the case.

Sidharth Vishwanath is actually trying multiple stuff in this movie to make it exciting. Firstly, he opts for this Rashomon effect by narrating the film from multiple perspectives. Then you have this tragic angle of the hero Parthi, who at one point talks about how an innocent guy like him eventually ended up doing all those things for which he was wrongly accused. Then there is this climax that sort of teases the judicial system by making the same system persuade Parthi for truth. These are some of the layers I can remember right now. If you observe each of the characters very closely, you can see that Sidharth Vishwanath is trying to make this movie a collage of characters with various types of personal agendas.

As I said, the effort is to make it a package of various writing methods. The reason why the movie misses out on having that overall cinematic elevation is the contrast between these treatments. For instance, in the middle of us seeing something that has the voice-over of a particular character, the movie goes into a sequence that this narrator may not know. And I think Sidharth Vishwanath is doing it deliberately to give the audience an idea of what happened. One of the reasons why the movie feels pretty engaging is because of the elaborate character pool. A gang leader, his furious right hand, his advisor of Srilankan origin, his religious guide, the SP of the jail, and his subordinate, there are so many characters in the story that eventually give the story a sense of depth.

The script is not really trying to make the inquiry commission officer a representative of the audience. So even though the movie is teasing that character and the audience with some half-truths about Parthi, towards the final act, there are no suspences for the audience, and it becomes this ambiguous talk about justice. I am not saying that path was underwhelming. But the contrast between the interval block and how the film ends, along with some logical inconsistencies during key events, somewhere drags the movie away from generating that wow moment. The cinematography has this two-tone lighting by Prince Anderson, which truly makes it a genre film. Selva RK has paced the film pretty effectively, and the build-up towards some of the key moments is done very neatly. The film marks the debut of Christo Xavier in Tamil, and it was a film where I felt the background score was constantly there, even on a mild level, to keep us glued to the screen. The production design of the movie also deserves appreciation.

This is the first time we see RJ Balaji in a slightly hefty character, and it is not a movie that is being shouldered by Balaji on a script level. When you look at the whole story, he is more of a victim who decides to adapt to the situation he eventually ends up in. The panicked and anxious portions in the second half were performed very effectively by him. Selvaraghavan plays the role of Siga, a notorious gangster who sort of got entrapped in the prison by the people in power. For some reason, the intimidation the script assigned to the character through that animated backstory was not really there when it came to the performance. Karunas, as Kattabomman, gets a very juicy character in the movie, and the arc of the character was also quite impressive. Sharaf U Dheen as the SP and Hakkim Shah as the fellow inmate were the two prominent Malayali actors in the star cast. It is kind of odd to accept them in those dubbed voices in the initial patches of the movie. But as the story progresses, the quality of the acting and the dubbing makes those performances solid on screen. Natarajan Subramaniam plays the role of the investigation officer convincingly. Saniya Iyyappan, Sudani from Nigeria fame Samuel Abiola Robinson, etc., are the other names in the elaborate star cast.

The number of subplots and characters in the movie is so many that you will be constantly engaged in thinking about the mind games happening between characters. While the film gives closure to all those tracks it opened to make the screenplay complex, some of them looked exciting, while some fell pretty flat as unnecessary distractions. Sidharth Vishwanath’s Sorgavaasal is an earnest attempt at making an elaborate dramatic thriller, but it needed some more fine-tuning.