Madraskaaran Review | This Wannabe Tragedy Causes More Headaches Than Heartache

Shane Nigam’s first movie in Tamil as a hero, Madraskaaran, is trying to be a Kireedam-like movie where you are supposed to empathize with the hero for what eventually happens in his life. But the way this movie by Vaali Mohan Das is reaching that point is excruciatingly long, and the spread-out nature of the twist and resolution is not at all keeping us hooked on to the content. With several characters who are close to the hero showing their love for him in the most insensitive way possible, Madraskaaran is a bloated emotional drama that might touch the hearts of those who are addicted to daily soaps.

Sathya, aka Sathyamoorthi, is about to get married to a girl he met in Chennai. But a day before the marriage, when he was going to meet his would-be Meera, an unfortunate accident happened, and a pregnant lady who got hit by Sathya’s car was taken to hospital. Tension increased at the hospital as everyone was curious to know the condition of the woman and her baby. The altercation between Sathya and the relatives of the woman and how that changes everything for Sathya is what we are seeing in Madraskaaran.

As I already said, the ultimate intention of the director is to make us feel bad for Sathya, who had to go through a lot of emotional trauma. But the situations Vaali Mohan Das has created to make that journey of Sathya painful are actually painful to sit through. So when the main event in the movie, the hospital scenario, happens, we can see everyone except the hero jumping to conclusions and doing and saying stupid things. The way the film tries to make all these people unnecessarily impulsive is so bad that when finally Sathya screams at everyone to calm down, you will find yourself laughing at the overreaction of the characters. And I am pretty sure that it is not the reaction the director intended to generate. And this behavior of characters not listening to someone just keeps on happening, and after a point, instead of empathy, you are looking at the hero and saying, “You deserve it for tolerating these impulsive people.”

Vaali Mohan Das is trying to spoon-feed everything to the audience, and the writing pretty much makes this movie look like one of those B and C center-films where subtlety has no place. If Kanguva made you uncomfortable with the decibel levels, Madraskaaran could make it difficult for you with the kind of quarrels happening in the movie. In both cases, the silence that you get to feel at the interval would feel like a blessing. In the second half, there is a twist that one can predict from a mile away, and the film just tries to dive into various possibilities. When you finally find out what really happened, it just feels like an exhausting, useless journey. I know that the intention of the filmmaker is to show us the sad reality of life, but Madraskaaran’s approach to presenting tragedy just doesn’t have the craft to make us feel for the characters.

In the initial happy portions of the character Sathya, Shane Nigam is not that perfect, as his dialogue rendering has a very thick Malayalam accent. When the movie approaches the turbulent and tragic space, which seems like an area Shane has cracked with his filmography, the performance starts to look real, and those portions have relatively fewer dialogues. Kalaiyarasan, as Duraisingam, is fine in his role, but it wasn’t a really demanding role in terms of scope to perform. Niharika Konidela, as the leading lady, was terrible in terms of performance. Karunas plays the role of the supportive uncle who, much like the rest of the family, just won’t listen. Then there is this antagonist played by someone whose name is not there on the Wikipedia or IMDB page of this movie. His body language is so funny, and his expressions are so flat that during the interval of the film, I googled the photo of the producer of the movie to just make sure that it wasn’t a compromise Vaali Mohan Raj took to get this movie made. Aishwarya Dutta doesn’t have much to do in this film, even though her character is pivotal to the movie.

Mild Spoiler Alert! There is a sequence in the movie where Sathya’s friends are revealing to him that his girlfriend got married while he was in jail. I mean, what kind of sadistic friends would take their best friend to the door of his girlfriend’s home and then scream from a distance that she married someone else? These impulsive relatives and sadistic friends represent a caring support system in Vaali Mohan Raj’s imagination, and if you subscribe to that ideology, you will feel the heartache of the hero, or else it will be a headache. Forgot to mention. They have ruined the Kaadhal Sadugudu song musically and visually.