Rest assured, Thupparivaalan is every bit a Mysskin movie. From the odd camera angles to the staging to the way characters move through the city and the story, the director has brought all his trademark fixtures to the detective drama starring Vishal.
The film plays out a cat-and-mouse game that starts off innocuously enough, with the death of a pet dog. Vishal’s Sherlock Holmes-style detective Kaniyan Pookundran quickly realises that there’s much more afoot when it turns out that the dog was shot with a 9 mm bullet.
The winding trail of murders that unfolds from this first discovery is certainly hard to swallow at times, but never completely unbelievable. And it is certainly never boring.
And Mysskin certainly has some nicely-scripted scenes to offer. Like the first time you see the gang of villains walk in together, you’re completely disarmed when they sit down to eat scrambled eggs. And just when you’re confused about what’s going on, one of them casually opens the refrigerator to reveal a dead body.
The one big misstep the film makes is with the quite unnecessary sub-plot involving a pickpocket named Mallika (Anu Emmanuel), which seems to have been inserted only to show Kaniyan’s socially-awkward but generous heart. Unfortunately, though, this relationship simply swings between illogical and sentimental, reaching a maudlin high point that could easily have been kept out.
Vishal needs to up his acting game before he can walk that fine line between fun and just plain weird. Prasanna is more convincing as the Watson-like foil to the master detective. Among the baddies Andrea Jeremiah brings a good deal of cool to the film. That she puts up a good fight, almost taking down Kaniyan near the climax is certainly a big plus for the film.
(The story was originally published on The News Minute and has been republished with permission.)
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