Puriyatha Puthir

Lens directed by Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan was a skillfully made thriller which succeeded in making an impact on the viewers on having awareness about their behavior in the cyber world. What Ranjit Jeyakodi is trying to achieve through the new film Puriyatha Puthir is somewhat the same. But his approach is more inclined to the typical commercial movie format and because of that you do get the message, but not necessarily the emotional impact.

Kathir is a musician and he has two close friends. One day he happens to meet a girl named Meera who was also a musician mainly interested in violin. The relationship between the two gradually became more intimate and at one point, Kathir started receiving vulgar images and video clips of Meera from an unknown number. This puts Kathir in a difficult place as he felt helpless and the movie is about his efforts to find the person behind such activities.

There is a revenge story hidden inside this psychological thriller. The issue with Puriyatha Puthir is that by the time it reveals its revenge agenda, a lot has happened in the story which looks and feels like a typical modern day commercial love story in Tamil. And the revenge segment actually had three parts out of which two got sidelined into five minutes subplots. The decision to treat it as a love story for a majority of the runtime is somewhat justifiable, but it is the lack of thrill and freshness in the approach of it that causes the problem.

Vijay Sethupathi is easily convincing as Kathir. The character has a charm in the beginning portions and gradually Kathir becomes more tensed and puzzled and Sethupathi maneuvers the character in all those areas neatly. Gayathrie in the pivotal role of Meera was also quite effective. Other than these two, the other characters doesn’t have that much of space and looking at the back story, you might feel that they should have got better screen time.

Ranjit Jeyakodi’s making is in that mid range of keeping the conversations and proceedings in the semi realistic tone. This partial realism is giving some life to the narrative. But where he should work is in building the screenplay. Like I already mentioned, the story getting more focus on Kathir is an issue when you look at the whole picture. Ranjit’s attempt to distract the audience through another stalker character wasn’t that convincing. The final act’s emotion was a good one, but a better build up would have made it much more convincing. The cinematography was fine and so were the cuts. Music was also decent.

Puriyatha Puthir is a social preach that tries to have the attire of a compelling psychological thriller. The preaching part is fine, but the thriller elements and the construction of the screenplay weren’t that absorbing.

Rating: 2.5/5