Black Review | An Engaging, but Extremely Diluted Version of Coherence

Reviewing the new Tamil movie Black is tricky because it’s like reviewing Ghajini after having seen Memento. So, if you have seen the 2013 English movie Coherence, directed by James Ward Byrkit, the chances of you looking down upon this adaptation of Coherence is pretty high because of the typical Tamil movie spoon-feeding and masala in the content. Directed by KG Balasubramani, Black is definitely an engaging film that sort of manages to cover up its flaws with its unique theme.

So the story here is about a couple, Vasanth and Aaranya. The couple has booked a villa far away from the city and one fine weekend they decided to stay in that villa which hasn’t really finished all the work. While staying alone in that villa property, certain unnatural things started to unfold, and they noticed that there was another house on that property that had occupants. The mystery behind that house and how the couple survives that lonely, terrifying night is what we see in Black.

SPOILERS AHEAD! I have seen Coherence, so this review will have certain comparisons with the original material. Like I said in the beginning, this is a very diluted, spoon-fed version of the source material. The original movie had a group of people in this particular situation, and here we have a couple. Coherence never had to set up a world in order to tell the story, but here, there are too many spooky elements, and this idea of a villa property feels like a creative limitation. It almost feels like they took the inspiration and decided to make a script that had the texture of the typical horror films that got made in Tamil over the last decade or so.

In Coherence, director James Ward Byrkit was not trying to make it a visually stunning thriller. The camera in that movie was always in this handheld position, making us a part of the group of people who were panicking. In the case of Black, KG Balasubramani is not trying to have a signature style. The blocking of scenes looks very conventional, and the way the film asks the audience to take note of certain things is very obvious. While the original explored a wide variety of possibilities, including a seamless merger of two realities, KG Balasubramani’s watered-down version doesn’t want to go after those complications.

In my review of the recent Malayalam film Pushpaka Vimanam, I mentioned how most of the Indian adaptations or copies of classic foreign language films feel the need for a backstory for everything. In Black also, we can see a flashback to explain the phenomenon. There is a dance number and a pointless fight with some random guy at the nightclub. And the way the characters speak in Tamil clearly shows the inability of KG Balasubramani to do story expositions. The way Coherence places Schrödinger’s cat hypothesis in the story compared to what we see in Black is another example of how the adaptation lacks depth. While the subtlety and handheld cinematography of the original concealed the time loop idea beautifully in the original, here, everything is on your face, and we are basically waiting for the characters to crack the mystery we already solved.

The performances here are not subtle because the screenplay doesn’t know how to convey vital information smartly. Jiiva, in his typical style, plays this irreverent Vasanth. Priya Bhavani Shankar, as Aaranya, also plays this very animated girlfriend whose reactions toward many things happening that night are very dramatic.

If you have not seen the original and don’t want to experience complicated subjects, Black is like a convenient starter pack for the brain. But if you have felt great about Black and thought certain things could have been explored in a better way, please try to watch Coherence. It is a great thriller with an extremely sensible approach to these hypothetical possibilities.