Srinivasan's Pachamarathanal-An Honest Review

Srinivasan's Pachamarathanal-An Honest Review


Pachamarathanalil


Sachidanandan (Sreenivasan) is a renowned cartoonist who leads a peaceful life with his beautiful wife Anu (Padmapriya) and a bubbly daughter Sneha (Ahina). When Sneha disappears midway through a commercial shoot, Circle Inspector Venkitesh (Nasar) gets busy hunting for clues, and unearths a few long buried skeletons from the family closet.

Pachamarathanalil might initially strike you as a kids’ flick, all loud and noisy. An odd half an hour later, it suddenly does a revamping of its background score into a spooky one and claims to be a thriller mystery.

Is Pachamarathanalil inspired from the Ben Affleck directed Gone Baby Gone?. Unlike the Hollywood flick, the missing-baby-mystery here refuses to gape at facts straight, and since it moves about with its eyes snapped shut, misses out on internal logic and a critical sense of judgment.

The film’s major weakness lies in its transparency more than in its implementation.

On screen though, Sreenivasan looks discomfited and totally embarrassed, and rigidly maintains a strange grimace throughout. Given the predicament that he has cornered himself into, even the smirk that he manages to come up with, should be a surprise. Padmapriya is infinitely better; and copes with the catastrophe. She diligently makes do with whatever is on offer and doesn’t make much of a fuss.

On the one hand there is an increasing number of pointless twists and turns and on the other a sharp decrease in the film’s vitality. By the climax, the last leftovers of mystery and credibility have been so efficiently ruined that there’s no genuine tension at all.