Andhagan Review | A Great Example of How Lack of Nuances Can Make Even the Most Exciting Script Look Dull

When you observe the writing of Sriram Raghavan’s  Andhadhun, it feels like anyone can direct that movie and make it a good or great film. The placement of twists, how it keeps us guessing, the realness in the performances, etc., keeps you excited about the story’s development. If you want to tell someone how minute things can make a great difference,  Andhagan is that “how not to” textbook on many levels. In case you are someone who has not seen Andhadhun yet, this review is not for you.

So, Krish, a blind pianist who earns a living by teaching and playing the piano, is our hero. He meets this beautiful young girl named Julie, who offers him a job at her father’s cafe. One fine day, yesteryear actor Karthik happens to see his performance and asks him for a private concert at his residence to celebrate his wedding anniversary. The series of events that happen in that house on the anniversary day and how it eventually changes the life of Krish is what we see in Andhagan.

One thing I feared, and some of you may have also feared when we knew about the remake announcement, was director Thiagarajan making any changes or add-ons to the existing script. The biggest relief for me was indeed the fact that he has not tried to tamper with the source material, rather than having a pointless song at the very end of the movie. The film is very much a scene-by-scene remake of the original, and hence, the screenplay’s complexity is maintained. But the slight exaggeration one would associate with a Tamil remake is there in the way scenes are treated, so, for someone who has seen the subtler and smarter original, this spoon-fed version of the same script becomes an unremarkable effort.

When you see the performance of Ayushmann Khurrana in Andhadhun, you can feel a sense of unpredictability, even in his confident and vulnerable bits. While the looks of Prashanth make him an eligible contender to be that naive and loveable character, he is stumbling when it comes to portraying the character’s struggle, which happens mostly in the second half. And there is an evident lack of swagger in the portrayal of this character. Simran has managed to make the character a believable one, considering the treatment of the movie had made Simi less cunning and more cruel. Priya Anand reduces Julie to a silly, screaming lover girl. Karthik, in his guest appearance, plays himself in the film. Samuthirakani was a bit too animated and goofy as the police officer. Yogi Babu is there with his typical lines and jokes. The most convincing casting in the whole lot for me was Urvashi, who was flowing effortlessly in her character. KS Ravikumar, Vanitha Vijayakumar, Leela Samson, etc., are the other names in the film’s cast.

As I said, while the scene-by-scene remaking nature of the filmmaking by Thiagarajan makes the story look coherent on screen, what he misses in his making is the nuances attached to each character. The staging of the murder in the original has a shock value, which was presented brilliantly through an editing style that made sure the visual would give the audience the same shock the hero feels. But in the Tamil version, the reaction it created is more of a curiosity than shock. The class of Sriram Raghavan in  Andhadhun was that he managed to distract the audience from guessing the moment when something unexpected would happen. Like how the neighbor gets killed, how the doctor gets killed, etc. In terms of staging the twist moments in the tale, Thiagarajan just can’t create that storytelling grace. The songs are fine, but in some ways, they feel a bit too excessive.

Andhagan is an underwhelming remake of Andhadhun that ignores the beauty of subtlety in the original. A lot of the things in the original got decoded by viewers in the long run as Sriram Raghavan placed certain details very causally in the frames. Maybe Thiagarajan was kind of insecure about people missing out on clues, that every “hidden” detail in the story was not so hidden in the Tamil version. Just compare the scene at the end, where the central character kicks the can with his stick, between the original and Tamil, and you would understand the missing finesse, even though both are the same on paper.