Airaa

Spoiler Alert! Without revealing some plot elements it will be difficult to review the film Airaa as those key elements are the problematic areas of this new Nayanthara film. The idea of a horror story where the ghost is seeking revenge because the society treated her badly when she was alive is a good thought. But in Airaa that issue is not at all addressed in a subtle way. The tricks in director Sarjun KM’s arsenal are pretty outdated and the melodramatic last half an hour of the movie is flat out annoying.

A young individual named Yamuna is our main protagonist. The self-made young lady decides to run away from her home to her grandmother’s house when her parents forced her to commit to an arranged marriage proposal. In her grandmother’s house, she happens to witness some unusual activities and eventually she understands that it was done by a ghost. Who that ghost is and why is that ghost roaming around Yamuna is what Airaa telling us.

The problem here is with the motive of the ghost. The reason why the ghost wants to kill Yamuna is way too insensitive. Imagine a situation where you are waiting for an auto rickshaw and when you finally got one, another person sort of asks for a lift and because you were in a bad mood you refuse to accept that request. Now imagine that person coming to attack you as a ghost because the auto he/she boarded met with an accident and that person died. This is a hypothetical situation I just made up to show you the ridiculousness of the reason why our main protagonist is getting chased by a ghost. And instead of trying to tell the ghost that she is overreacting, our heroine decides to lend the ghost her body to fulfill the ghost’s wish. Airaa is one movie where the scene construction may keep you invested in it, but there is no real coherence in the main story.

Nayanthara as Yamuna is in her usual elements and is pretty much like most of those talkative characters she has played in, say a movie like Naanum Rowdy Dhaan. The second character of Bhavani was something that was not in her comfort zone and she was able to make that character look real despite the writing being flimsy. Kalaiyarasan as the always in grief Amudhan was convincing. I am pretty sure Yogi Babu got added on after seeing the success of Kolamavu Kokila. Jayaprakash, Kulappulli Leela, film critic Maathevan, etc. are there in the cast.

Sarjun KM seems to be clueless on how to develop the idea from scratch. There was an observation made by famous film critic Baradwaj Rangan about the writer-director trend in Tamil films. I think this movie is a good example of the problem Mr. Rangan mentioned. Sarjun is struggling to introduce new ideas and is going after clichéd ingredients and the writer in him doesn’t even bother to question the rationality of sequences. A guy inside the theater said it loud that he hasn’t seen any ghosts who take revenge on such silly matters. What the ghost does to Yamuna’s family also intensifies the insensitivity. The screenplay is aimless and doesn’t really know how to construct subplots that will add to the whole story. The cinematography was good. The background score was on the typical side.

The inherent insensitivity in the motive of the ghost in Airaa makes the movie a problematic experience. Because of that, the movie fails to create any sort of empathy towards those suffering characters. If well made, this would have been an effective take against and racist and superstitious mentality in the minds of people.

Rating: 2/5

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By Aswin Bharadwaj

Founder and editor of Lensmen Reviews.

View all of Aswin Bharadwaj's posts.