Drones Movie Review:
With its bizarre premise and a handful of promising ideas, Drones could have been an entertaining horror comedy. Instead, the film struggles to make sense of its own universe, offering a tedious blend of unconvincing scares, half-baked science fiction, and humour that rarely lands.
Drones begins with three friends, Kish (Dravid Selvam), Rush (Anjali Nair), and Dush (RJ Deepak), who are kicked out of their college. Seeking refuge, they end up in the lab of a madcap scientist, Black Hole Padmanabhan (Kuraishi), who traps the trio in his lab for an experiment called... Black Hole. Meanwhile, Inspector Madhavan (Cinemawala Sathish) and his assistant, Cerlac Homes (Sassi Selvaraj), investigate a spate of murders committed by someone called 'Dancing Psycho.' We also have a witch (Devadarshini) who torments her granddaughter, Prakruti (Siddhi Idnani), for falling in love.
Wish the screenplay and its ideas, some of which have great potential, were as sincere as the names the makers have chosen for their lead characters. The story unfolds in a bizarre universe populated by screwballs and built around two structures. This world, which interacts with space, Earth, and the netherworld, needed the kind of madcap conviction that Mark Antony brought to its theme. Apart from the garish laboratory-cum-confinement space, complete with kaleidoscopic rooms, flickering lights, and incessant electronic beeps, little suggests anything sinister about the place. Yet, for those who enter, there seems to be no way back. By the way, Kish finds his way out of this lab-cum-confinement-cum-maze 40 minutes in. But the audience is subjected to this pointless mad ride for nearly two more hours.
Director: Raghav Mirdath
Cast: Dravid Selvam, Kuraishi, Devadarshini, Siddhi Idnani, Anjail Nair, RJ Deepak, Cinemawala Sathish, Sassi Selvaraj
To avoid admitting defeat in an argument, we sometimes stubbornly keep shifting the goalposts. Drones is that argument masquerading as a film. When the lab runs out of ideas, even the weaker ones, the film shifts its attention to the witch and her machinations, and to the police investigation. Padmanabhan is a scientist who detests practices such as astrology and fortune-telling. He wants to build a humanoid with programmable emotions and bypass superstitions when choosing a partner. The opening scenes make it clear that nothing in the film is meant to be serious. Yet the mock-serious humour surrounding the experiments on the three friends is conspicuously absent.
A scary scene can either jolt you or bore you. Except for the climactic stretch, even a superbly talented actor like Devadarshini cannot salvage the witch role. The writers reach for the lowest-hanging fruit in the witch sequences, having her break the fourth wall to flaunt her terrifying countenance. These scenes are so bad that you're tempted to dismiss them altogether, especially when the film has already given us so few reasons to like it.
Drones somewhat finds its feet when the mystery surrounding Prakruti's miniature art is revealed. Add to this a few mild chuckles courtesy of RJ Deepak's Dush. By the third act, the film almost seems to have gone out of character, or perhaps acquired one for the first time. However, after prolonging its vain attempts at zany horror-comedy, the film's sci-fi exposition feels convenient and unconvincing. Messaging, like several other aspects of the film, is not its forte. Some of the film's own choices also run counter to its anti-colourism pitch.
You can't blame anyone for feeling like a test subject in a psychological experiment while watching Drones. The film feels like a test of just how restless an audience can get, and how they react under prolonged exposure to something exasperating. Like the battle between the angel and the witch in the film, your inner angel and demon will constantly be confused about whether to forgive or forget, and both don't bode well for the film.
