The new Trisha starrer, The Road, is an exhausting thriller that struggles to keep things engaging for the viewer. Writer-director Arun Vaseegaran has this plan to narrate the story of the protagonist and antagonist parallelly to create a grey area. But the development of each track is so basic and shallow that you just won’t feel like rooting for both of them at any point, even after they both have gone through a lot in their lives. With a predictable storyline taking an awful lot of time to reach the expected conclusion, The Road was a tiring experience.
SPOILER ALERT! Meera is our central character; her family comprises her husband and son. They had planned a road trip for their son’s birthday. But Meera had to back out from that trip since she was pregnant. Life took a tragic turn when an accident took the lives of Meera’s husband and son. How Meera dealt with that trauma and how she solved the mystery behind the death of her husband and son is what we see in The Road.
When you look at the screen time they have given to the heroine and the villain, it is kind of strange to see the villain having more space in the movie. Even though his track is full of predictable moments, it wasn’t as shallow as the writing for the heroine’s part. The Meera track we see in the film has a very generic tone, and most of the time, you could sense the movie trying to be a Trisha fan-pleaser with “mass” moments that don’t sync with the character she is playing on screen. There is absolutely no mention of the past of Trisha’s character, and the way she investigates the whole thing looks a bit too convenient and easy. The interval block that has our leading lady getting into investigative mode pops up very oddly.
Arun Vaseegaran’s script wants to use the actual incidents of highway robbery to create a compelling thriller. But beyond the basic layer of the idea, Arun isn’t trying to make things exciting for the viewer, and somewhere, he assumes a lot of gore and showing characters as vultures can make the premise gripping. The entire track of Meera has many issues regarding conviction, as we are clueless about who she really is. The way she was cracking the case was so good that I was sort of expecting the movie to have a climax that would reveal her as some sort of undercover cop. But that never happened, and like I already said, the character-building is done more effectively in the case of Maya. While the backstory had this exaggerated character who is like a toxic female stalker, the strokes in that flashback are pretty broad.
As Meera, Trisha is not really entering an unfamiliar area. We have seen her cracking similar characters of late, and this one also had almost all the emotions, sadness being the most prominent one. Dancing Rose Shabeer Kallarakkal gets to play this antagonist with a hefty back story. Even though the movie eventually took him to that eccentric space towards the end, something he is known for, it was nice to see him as a regular guy in the first half of the movie. Miya, MS Bhaskar, Vela Ramamoorthy, etc., are the other names in the cast.
The Road is an unimaginative attempt to create a thriller about the infamous highway robberies, and the movie ends by saying this pattern is not going to end. If written properly with nuances, The Road could have been a disturbing commentary about the financial imbalance in society. But with a predictable script that somewhere is desperate to make Trisha an embodiment of woman empowerment, The Road just becomes a bloated thriller that has nothing exciting to offer.
With a predictable script that somewhere is desperate to make Trisha an embodiment of woman empowerment, The Road just becomes a bloated thriller that has nothing exciting to offer.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
