Director: Innasi Pandiyan
Cast: Arulnithi, Pavithra Marimuthu, Kishore Kumar G, V Jayaprakash
Arulnithi’s Diary seems to be a film that was written backwards. It’s a thriller with many supernatural elements thrown in and it requires us to hold on to large pieces of information for a long time, only for them to make sense when the twists are revealed. But the issue with Diary isn’t just that it’s written around one or two major twists. There are many and they are directed towards us starting at the one-hour mark with a new revelation coming in every 10 minutes or so. At first you are amused that it has taken so long for these ideas to finally come together. By the third big revelation, it feels too co-incidental to feel real anymore. And by the fourth or fifth twist, you don’t care anymore because anything can happen at any point in time.
This is generally the feeling that dilutes some of the striking ideas in Diary. My favourite among these is the concept of a haunted bus with a mysterious set of passengers travelling on the last bus out of Ooty. Each passenger has a history and a purpose, and this is made more interesting when it feels like a mix of genres within the bus itself with an investigation, a comedy, a romance and a horror movie being played all at once.
Individually, each of these elements feel too basic to actually make a difference. The comedy subplot, for instance, is that of a man cracking one joke after another on his way to elope with his lover, the night before her wedding. On the other side is the drama of a young couple on the run after the girl’s MLA father sends goons to kill them. Let’s take the case of this young couple to explain why we never feel anything for them. This is a couple whose plight is meant to be the emotional base for the whole film. They are young and earnest and they are on the run from a set of people who will surely murder them. But the second the couple starts opening up they are also stupid enough to reveal that they’ve come with a big bag of gold, that too with the exact amount. Now when the couple themselves are naive enough to risk their lives with this information, we don’t really care if they stay alive or not.
This is generally the deal with every character in the film. With the format of the screenplay obsessing over the next big twist, it forgets to place any kind of emphasis on bringing these characters alive. They should have felt real for us to care for them, but they are just doing their own thing without a care in the world for why they are doing them. And you feel this most in the excruciatingly long first hour, when the plot is set up. An under-training sub inspector (Arulnithi) randomly picks an unsolved case to investigate as his first assignment. He meets a cute police inspector, they fall in love, we get a basic AF love song and they also start investigating before the actual plot kicks in with the haunted bus. With random events such as a man stealing this officer’s car forced into the screenplay for these events to begin, there’s just too much silliness early on for us to take the film seriously.
But when our defences are down and when the film willingly dumps any effort to stay logical, there is some fun to be had. One particular twist felt surprisingly original even though you feel annoyed that they didn’t do more with the idea. It’s also a film that brings together too many different strands to make a larger point, making it feel overstuffed and tiring. With a little bit more care and a more careful choice of subplots, we wouldn’t need to wait for the twists alone to get to the point. With loud and frustrating performances, silly dialogues and an overall hollowness in the way its written, Diary isn’t quite the page-turner it could have so easily been. A film about a haunted bus travelling through the ghats at midnight needed to be far more fun than this.
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