BLOODY BEGGAR Review - Bloody Boring!

Ashwin Ram

Premise: Kavin is a roadside beggar who gets invited to a bungalow as part of almsgiving. He decides to secretly stay there for a night, leading to being an imposter as a family member. The strange happenings overnight form the crux of the story.

Writing/ Direction: The filmmaking is new-age with an admirable clarity in visual storytelling and music knowledge. There are many funky ideas that add value to the bizarre mood of the film. The underlying emotion in Kavin’s backstory makes his character an empathetic one. But the core is never clear as it desires to be many things in the process but ends up being barely impactful in totality. The overly loud tone fails to work as the dark comedy situations are weakly set. There are a truckload of supporting characters in the movie, but no one earned the writer’s respect. They are just puppets, behaving weird for no reason. The story suffocates in a small box before the final act with no space to move forward. Every random piece of paper that has something written on it is stuffed in the climax which miserably fails to appeal. The happenings are not interestingly packaged, the boring stretches start to test the patience when things go unapologetically overboard without any substance to encourage the genre.

Performances: Kavin is a wonderful performer and there are no second thoughts about it, he presents versatility with great confidence as a beggar. Not even a single joke of Redin Kingsley is funny, he just keeps shouting on top of his voice. Jailer fame Harshad gets an opportunity to shine with a quirky idea for his character sketch, but repetitiveness becomes unbearable after a point. None of the other artists are impressive as well, no momentum as it is and the exaggerated treatment ruins it further.

Technicalities: Jen Martin’s songs are decent, although the music tracks play a small role in the narrative, the sincerity is appreciable. His background score is indeed a quality addition to the dryness in the film. Sujith Sarang has elevated the film visually to his best and has tried to hide the shortcomings in the content, cool colour palette and some well-thought camera angles. Lags are all over the place, barring the initial portions, they take the upper hand when the story is reduced to happening within a single house, a lot of fine-tuning was essential on the editor’s table.

Verdict:  Lackluster script presented in a polished manner with nice music and promising visuals. Sadly the narration is extremely weak being overly eccentricity and the characters are treated as jokers in the name of exaggeration.

BLOODY BEGGAR - Bloody Boring!