The final act and the entire second half of the new Netflix movie Test, the debut directorial venture of YNout studios head S Sashikanth, had some fire in it. The way it becomes an extremely character-driven movie in that patch where every character is in a space where they have to choose between their desire and their conscience would make you feel that it would all have been great if the setups in the screenplay had the same fire to keep us interested. With the movie sort of ending when the script finally gets some spark, Test ends up being an underwhelming thriller that couldn’t explore its potential.
So, the movie is talking about three characters. A senior Indian cricketer named Arjun is under a lot of pressure due to his poor form, a school teacher named Kumudha badly wants to have a baby through IVF, and her husband Saravanan, a scientist, wants to build a new kind of engine that can significantly reduce the carbon emission and is waiting for the approval of the authorities, are these characters. What we see here is how the worlds of these three get connected under troublesome circumstances.
The film begins with its focus entirely on Arjun’s track. Arjun, who is addressed as Dada by everyone, a name associated with Sourav Ganguly, is going through a phase similar to what Ganguly had to face towards the end of his career. We are shown how his ego has grown over the years, and there are these insights about the inner politics in the world of cricket. Then, the movie gradually shifts to the world of Saravanan and Kumudha, and that’s a pretty generic story of hopes and aspirations. I feel writer Suman Kumar had this idea of placing his characters in a position to choose between two extreme choices. Even though he sort of succeeds in cracking that gray zone of human desire towards the end, the build-up towards that is pretty patchy.
In places where the movie really gets the rhythm and becomes a thriller, we can see director Sashikanth, in collaboration with cinematographer Viraj Singh Gohil, doing some creative visual experiments like that dramatic lighting in that phone conversation between two characters. But the issue with the movie largely lies in the first half, and these logical questions are popping up in our head about how this wasn’t necessarily such a tricky situation. The first half of the movie, which mainly shows us the current life situations of the main characters, was mostly flat, and in the case of Arjun, when you look at that track in totality, it was almost like too many setups and too few payoffs.
R Madhavan, as Saravanan, is really getting into the zone in the final quarter of the movie, and the area where the script talks about the sugar-coated selfish dreams of human beings gets a really good push through his performance in that space. Nayanthara also gets a tricky character here. Kumudha is a flawed and interesting character, and she pulled off the dilemmas of that character neatly on screen. Siddharth, who played the part of the cricketer Arjun, has this stubborn, arrogant body language. I know that it is something the script demanded. However, since the screenplay couldn’t establish the reason for his grumpiness effectively, the performance also felt a bit exaggerated. Meera Jasmine, who plays the part of Arjun’s partner, has one scene here to really perform, and she was good at that.
Because of the disjoint and not-so-coherent premise-building process of the movie that happens in the first half of Test, the fire is lost in the beginning itself. And the film takes a really long time to find the ember to reignite life in this thriller. There also, we have these evident logical inconsistencies that are bothering you in the back of your mind even when you are enjoying these debates about selfishness. Test tries its best in the filmmaking part to cover up the flaws in the script. But the limits of that are very clear when you watch the film. One thing I have to give to the makers is the way they captured cricketing bits. Just like how Amit Sharma did a great job in covering football realistically in Maidaan, Sashikanth does a great job in pulling off an international cricket match on screen.
Because of the disjoint and not-so-coherent premise-building process of the movie that happens in the first half of Test, the fire is lost in the beginning itself.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
