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