One of the biggest obstacles to overcome in a science fiction film is exposition. Since the genre operates on specific rules, which often differ for each film, the writers need to effectively communicate everything to the audience in a succinct and engaging manner.
The problem is doubly complex for Tamil films which deal with cerebral concepts like time and parallel universes. In that regard, Jiiva’s Black seems to have overcome the clumsiness usually seen in cerebral Tamil films. While Black might not strictly be science fiction, it borrows many elements from the elusive genre. However, the problem with the film is its obsessive indulgence in making the narrative complex and ‘mind-bending’.
Reported to be the official remake of Coherence (2013), Black is highly effective when it follows the narrative of the original. The problems arise when it tries to explain the strange time anomaly with sci-fi word salad like ‘Quantum Entanglement’ ‘Wormhole’ and ‘Parallel Timelines’.
Whatever goodwill the film accrued in the initial half of the film by restricting exposition, is derailed in the second half, when it betrays the trust it had in its audiences and goes on an exposition spree. It is ironic that Black falters when it strays away from the original film’s story and tries to incorporate its own ideas, which unfortunately aren’t original enough.
Black is largely engaging for how efficiently director KG Balasubramani extracts performances from his cast. The emotional range of the characters is strictly contained within befuddlement, anxiety, paranoia, and fear, in precise measurements and never embellished.
For a film dealing with reality-bending concepts, you need a skilled performer who sells the believability of the events. Jiiva taps into the range exhibited in his earlier films and shoulders the entire film with a subtle yet effective performance.
Any amount of exaggeration on Jiiva’s part might have ruined the grounded approach the story was going for. Fortunately, Jiiva seems to have understood the assignment. However, the same could not be said of Priya Bhavani Shankar. While her take on the character is functional enough, it still comes off as uninventive.
For a film with a grounded and gritty approach, Black loses its hold on our attention with the portions involving the 1960s timeline and Vivek Prasanna’s character. However, the film still connects with you because at its core, it is not a story about time anomalies or parallel realities, it is about a couple who are forced to go through their marital woes, and whether or not they accept their flaws and save their relationship. This is why the contrived final few minutes make us feel like the film has let go of its emotional core and is once again focusing on coming across as a ‘complex’ story.
At its heart, Black makes the best use of the genre. It uses complex sci-fi concepts to tell a human story about relatable struggles. The execution, however, wraps layers and layers of complexity and sci-fi jargon around a solid core, in a desperate attempt to complicate a simple narrative, which renders it messy.
Black once again proves to us that no matter the execution, the heart of a story (or its lack thereof) will always decide how much we connect with a film. In this particular case, it seems that the debut filmmaker has made an engaging thriller with the only problem being his overwrought execution, for a film that would have worked with a subtle directorial touch.
Director: KG Balasubramani
Cast: Jiiva, Priya Bhavani Shankar, Vivek Prasanna
Rating : 2.5/5