Black Review - Never Audacious nor Bare Minimum Engaging!

Ashwin Ram

Black is a Sci-Fi thriller starring Jiiva and Priya Bhavani Shankar in the lead roles. The film is directed by debutant KG Balasubramani and produced by SR Prabhu.

Premise:

Jiiva and Priya Bhavani Shankar are a married couple who plan for a trip to a beach resort. What strange incidents they face there and how they finally come out of it safely forms the remaining story.

Writing/ Direction:

Commences in 1964 with a mysterious scene by giving a glimpse of what is in the store. Cut to present, we are in to witness a film that runs for less than two hours, but we are offered the age-old commercial elements for nearly half an hour. This genre deserves to be focused and hence these usual tropes of randomly placing a couple of songs, hero fighting randos as they harassed the heroine don’t fit in along with the main theme. It is mainly because of these deviations, it is difficult for us to gel with the story world, and things become serious just before the interval. Until then there are moments and hints that are going to be used in the second half. Unfortunately nothing comes together well, the hints are all lame in the form of a cigar packer, photo frame gift and the phone talk that raises an affair doubt makes zero impact. It’s a high-concept that deals with the multiverse, but all have been conveyed just verbally and there is no variation between the different timelines. Except for the opening, closing and the interval scene, the film is never intriguing and lets us care for the characters, mainly because of the issue in its narrative. We ought to be tense about whether the lead pair will escape from the trap or not, but the hero is sitting out at a police station in the beginning of the movie and explaining stuff that happened for the past two days. The Déjàvu element, wormhole and other complex topics just make the screenplay more complicated. A thriller should ideally build the theme, create confusion and clear the dots, here the setup is itself a big dud and the rest are weakly written as well. Suddenly, the film enters this quantum physics class space, too much of half-baked experiments results in failure. Things conclude so easily at the end without the characters using their brains, they are treated just as chess coins and not as the players.

Performances:

Jiiva and Priya Bhavani Shankar have played their part by doing what has been asked, but their fearsome expressions and body language needed more punch. Their chemistry is also flat as the husband and wife intimacy equation is missing. Vivek Prasanna and Sha Ra appear in a couple of scenes but nothing great to specify, however the former has an important purpose in the story.

Technicalities:

Both the songs that are bizarrely placed are dull to listen to, the score is a mixed bag, some neat stretches but certain parts appear to be like sound effects and there is this weird doubt whether it is the scene’s surrounding noise or the background music played. Camera man has stayed true to the director’s vision, it’s the filmmaker who should have had the conviction to present the high-concept differently. From the technician front, the night shots are crystal clear but there are quite a bit of amateur slow motion frames. The minimal existence of VFX feels fake, the fire incident and the green mat shots for example. Editing isn’t any special too, the film fails to be tight enough and be genre-specific, the unwanted commercial compromises could have been avoided.

Bottomline

Suffers to stick firmly in focus with the story, the poorly incorporated mainstream elements spoil the first reel of the flow. But the issue isn’t just that, there is absolutely no intensity in how the main story is presented, the Sci-Fi elements ruin it further.

Rating - 2/ 5