'Yaarukku Theriyum' (Tamil)
Director: G Kamaraj
Cast: Kalabhavan Mani, A Krishna Moorthy, Sanjana
With an assorted cast of actors from various languages, the plot centres around a motley group of characters who get trapped in a factory with no way out. A trilingual, the film has been made in Tamil, Malayalam (‘120 minutes’) and Kannada (‘Challenge’ released a couple of months earlier).
It is about five men and a woman, who wake up to find themselves in a deserted factory. Suffering from temporary amnesia, they seem to have forgotten their identities. A little hard to take, that all of them suffer from memory loss, and that none of them seem to be carrying any sort of identity on them. With no memories of how they came to be there, nor of how each was related to the other, they are wary of one another.
One seemed to be tied to a chair, another was easy with a gun. Repeated orders from an anonymous caller on the phone suggesting that a couple of the hostages would soon be killed, confound the situation further.
For they have no clue as to who the hostages were and who the kidnappers. At times the scenario turns too verbal and tiring, the characters indulging in too many petty arguments.
On another track is a cop and a business tycoon searching for the latter’s missing son-in-law. In the latter half the narration shuttles between past and present, ties up the knots and unravels the mystery. A rip-off of the 2006 English film ‘Unknown’ (already rehashed in Hindi as ‘Acid factory’), the director has stayed largely faithful to the original.
The plot opens promisingly, intriguing and suspense-filled. Edgy and gritty as the narration proceeds, it touches on friendship and betrayal, human greed and callousness.
But the characters are too many, and the numerous sub-plots linking them at times seem contrived. Among the actors Achyuth Kumar as Soori, and Harishraj as Basha, leave their mark. With about roughly two hours of viewing time, the film is an action-suspense thriller for hardcore lovers of the genre.