Secret Review | SN Swamy’s Synchronicity Thriller Is an Outdated Atrocity

SN Swamy is a name a lot of Malayalies are familiar with, mainly due to the mostly successful CBI franchise. He has been a scriptwriter for a really long time, and the new movie Secret is his first directorial venture. Starting as some kind of exploration of omens, Secret loses its focus on being a thriller in the midway, and what you get is a cringe-inducing muddled package of goodness and a lot of newspaper-cutting information about people who had good fortune due to these good omens.

Midhun, a medical representative, goes to Tamilnadu to attend his friend’s wedding, and during that visit, his friend Prince forces him to try Nadi Astrology. The astrologer tells Midhun that there is no marriage written in his future, and that puts Midhun in a difficult situation as he is already engaged, and the wedding date is very near. How Midhun and his friends deal with this situation is what we get to see in SN Swamy’s Secret.

A few years back, Balachandra Menon had tried his luck at directing films that featured the younger generation. There was an evident lack of connection in the way the director studied that generation, and in almost all those movies, I felt like screaming at the screen that we don’t function like this. Something very similar can be said about SN Swamy’s Secret. Not only does he struggle to understand the vibe of the generation, but there are certain outdated filmmaking tropes that he still uses. The entire portion that leads up to the wedding of Midhun is just terrible to sit through. When the character of Renjith gets into the picture, talking about the science of omens and coincidences, I was hoping to see some reason why anyone would have felt potential in this subject. But sadly the “spread goodness,” “believe in yourself,” and “save lives” kind of motivational spirituality was what was there for the audience.

Dhyan Sreenivasan plays the role of Midhun in this film, and it is a generic performance with nothing to remember. Aparna Das plays the part of Midhun’s close friend Ameya. It wasn’t a demanding character. The counter dialogue her character says, when Midhun wakes up from a bad dream during the road trip gave me that much-needed dose of unintentional comedy. Jacob Gregory plays the role of Prince and I was really hoping to see a flashback bit that showed Prince giving his kidney to any of the friends because there was no other reason for such a negative guy to be in any friend circle. Ranjith performed the role of a well-read man, similar to how he speaks during IFFK, but with less arrogance. Ardra Mohan is paired opposite to Dhyan in this film. Even though the character is critical to the plot, there is hardly anything there for her to perform.

The second law of thermodynamics, entropy, synchronicity, etc., are the elements here that have motivated SN Swamy to do a movie using them. But for a movie to work, you need a solid and exciting story that uses these ingredients effectively. SPOILER ALERT! When the character played by Ranjith suggests this idea of saving three lives in order to bargain for one life, I was hoping the movie wouldn’t take that trajectory. But what you ultimately get is an amplified version of Dhyan Sreenivasan doing “Nanmayulla Lokame” level good things, and it is just an excruciating experience. It is so sad to see someone like SN Swamy using ideas that can’t even compete with amateur short films.

Promoted as some sort of supernatural suspense thriller, Secret eventually ends up being a preachy motivational film about confidence when coincidences demotivate you. There is a guilty pleasure humor in watching movies about the younger generation that are written by veteran writers with absolutely no idea about their thought processes and lingo. The movie Secret is one such roast-worthy vapid creation.