Perusu, the new Tamil funeral comedy from director Ilango Ram, is the remake of his own Simhala film Tentigo. The movie has a very peculiar and outrageously funny premise. While the premise is offering the movie a lot of opportunity to explore one-liner jokes and situational humor, in the middle portions, it is finding it difficult to sustain the excitement. But with a climax that smartly utilizes the chaos-comedy trope, Perusu is a small film that succeeds in achieving its small ambition.
Halasyam, an old man, is our title character, and the man dies at the very beginning of the movie. He died in the morning while he was listening to songs on the TV. If you have seen the trailer of the film, they have indirectly revealed the main element of the story. Let me just put it this way. The old man died in a way that his family would have to go through a certain level of embarrassment due to the 207th bone in the dead body. How they deal with this embarrassing situation is what we see in Perusu.
There is a very satiric layer to this concept, which mocks how our society is concerned about peripheral issues over fundamental problems. The premise of this movie could have been developed into something like the Malayalam movie Thamasha or Vicky Donor. But Ilango Ram doesn’t have that level of aspiration, and he opts to stick to the humor the situation could create. The problem is that there is a limit to the organic humor one can create out of a particular situation. Thus, in the middle portions of Perusu, you can sense the humor graph dipping considerably.
Vaibhav and Sunil, the real-life brothers, are playing reel-life brothers Durai and Saami, respectively. As the drunkard Durai, Vaibhav is able to offer that comical relief through that slightly insensitive person. Sunil, who we haven’t seen much in films, gets a pretty extensive role, and in terms of scope to perform, I thought the writing gave him a lot of space. The character of Saami is going through a lot, unlike Durai, and Sunil grabs the opportunity to showcase his range. Influencer Niharika is paired with Vaibhav in the film. While her expressions matched the pitch of the comedy, the diction was flawed. Bala Saravanan and Deepa Shankar were hilarious as the supporting characters. Redin Kingsley gets a character that matches his usual annoying pitch. Chandini Tamilarasan, Karunakaran, Munishkanth, etc., are the other actors in the film.
If you look at the beginning confusion and the ending chaos, we can see that Ilango Ram has good clarity in constructing the humor. Every line cracked for the sake of humor, for instance, how Redin Kingsley talks about Saami’s crush on the science teacher has a payoff in the final act of the film. And even the satiric part that talks about how conscious we are about the image in society gets treated in a hilarious way. Because of the feature film format, Ilango Ram has the responsibility to build a middle portion, and for that, he decides to introduce hurdles in the form of new characters. While the one-line jokes and situational humor are making us giggle, compared to how the movie entered the premise, one could sense the script getting dragged. There is an effort to add depth to the film through the conversation inside the car between the brothers. But it kind of stood out as a sober moment in a comedy movie.
Perusu is a film that doesn’t want to get out of the comfort zone it gets from the premise. The premise is hilarious, and without even pushing much, it offers a lot of laugh-out-loud moments for us to be entertained while sitting through the film. Looking at the drop in the creative energy in the middle areas of the movie, I thought it had the potential to have a thicker emotional layer of maybe a dysfunctional family, which, sadly, it didn’t explore. Having said that, the film never really bored me while I was watching it.
With a climax that smartly utilizes the chaos-comedy trope, Perusu is a small film that succeeds in achieving its small ambition.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
