When a challenge has the stamp of Fahadh Faasil, we anticipate some kind of spark in it, provided that he has led with wonderful examples reminiscent of Maheshinte Prathikaaram, Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, and Kumbalangi Nights, to call a couple of. Sadly, that inkling proves to be a silly expectation right here with the actor’s option to do a movie like Maareesan. It’s a ridiculously insensitive movie that weaponises severe points like Alzheimer’s illness and youngster sexual abuse.
Spoilers for Maareesan forward!
Projection of Alzheimer’s illness
Image this. It’s 2025, and we’re nonetheless greenlighting tasks that deal with Alzheimer’s illness like a story scapegoat. It’s merely a projection. In Maareesan, Vadivelu’s character Velan first seems in handcuffs. An area, wayward thief, Dhaya (Fahadh Faasil), spots him first, and Velan tells him that he has Alzheimer’s illness. After recognizing that Velan has lakhs in his checking account, Dhaya plans to take advantage of him with the motive of stealing his total financial savings alongside the best way.
However Maareesan desires to indicate us that it’s intelligent and one step forward of the viewer, as Velan will not be as harmless as he tasks himself to be. In actual fact, because the movie progresses, will probably be revealed that he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s illness in any respect! Bingo! A movie that weaponises a severe neurodegenerative dysfunction for the sake of shock worth. No iota of sensitivity is current right here; it’s merely a gimmick, a kind of adhesive to deliver these two characters collectively.
Velan is the one who’s dishonest, mendacity, and, in a single unnecessarily violent scene that doesn’t minimize away, killing one other character with a hammer. That is an especially problematic depiction, which propagates the dangerous thought that individuals dwelling with these signs would possibly as nicely be cheats. Later, when Dhaya finds out that this previous man has been mendacity beneath his tooth, he desires to show him a lesson. However that isn’t all, because the movie then reveals that Velan’s spouse is the one who suffers from the signs of Alzheimer’s illness. Her portrayal is unsurprisingly seen by the lens of sympathy, and characteristically sidelined when she is unable to recognise the face of a molester. He steps in to do the needful; she will not be required anymore.
Insensitive depiction of kid sexual abuse
That is the place Maareesan tackles the topic of kid sexual abuse, a sudden revelation that fully adjustments the tone of the movie. The movie turns into a rape-revenge saga devoid of the presence of ladies. The script is completely confused and insensitive, the place the victims of the horrific act are silenced and by no means given the possibility to exist inside the body. The one time they do is when they’re navigating their trauma of sexual abuse in some type. Nevertheless, their honour turns into the prime motive for the protagonist to additional propel the male-saviour complicated.
In Maareesan, the feminine characters exist merely as space-fillers, as objects of sympathy, and as our bodies which have skilled sexual trauma and thereby should keep hidden from the general public (and the body). The dearth of sensitivity is obtrusive within the later scenes, the place the makers appear to have spent no second thought with regards to youngster sexual abuse.
It’s Velan who’s revealed to behave out as a vigilante, and the movie goes on to justify his actions as a person taking the regulation into his personal fingers and killing the criminals one after the opposite. This was the revelation, and the premise that was promised on the outset- it by no means actually existed. This formal narrative selection arrives like a complete disregard of the viewers’s emotional funding within the story. With Velan and later with Dhaya, Maareesan performs out as an act of delivering performative justice. It is a woefully misjudged and regressive character research that wishes to indicate off its veneer of sincerity. It gaslights the viewer into believing, after which tells us to consider in the actual story from the shadows. Therein lies the irony.
Maareesan is out there to observe on Netflix.