‘Nenjam Marappathillai’ is the Tamil horror film, written and directed by Selvaraghavan and jointly produced by P Madan, Siddharth Rao, Anirudh Krishna and Gitanjali Selvaraghavan. SJ Surya, Regina Cassandra and Nandita Swetha, play the lead roles of the movie. The music director of the movie is Yuvan Shankar Raja and Arvind Krishna and Prasanna GK handled the camera and editing respectively.
The movie is about Ramsay, his family, his house, his servants and Mariam, the caretaker of his child Rishi. Establishing the character of Ramsay (SJ Suryah), husband of a rich man’s daughter, from rags to riches, shows himself perfect, almost a psychopath, looks at his son’s caretaker with lust. Ramsay’s wife, Swetha (Nandita Swetha), the daughter of a rich man, always angry, having some unknown ailment and not interested in sex. And the orphan Mariam (Regina Cassandra), taken the job of the caretaker of the child in this home with a noble purpose. And the servants behave peculiar. The conflicts and the confusions arising with these, make the rest of the plot.
SJ Surya plays the character of nearly a psychopath very perfectly and it seems that Selvaraghavan has developed the character, keeping him in mind. And the actor balances his performance skillfully between credibility and incredibility.
Regina Cassandra as Mariam takes a lot of load and fully justifies her character. Comparing her previous movies, she got more scope in this movie and her big eyes speak more of her feelings. As Ramsay’s wife, Nadita Swetha does the given role without any flaw.
The background score of Yuvan Shankar Raja elates the effectiveness of most of the scenes and it is one of the few plus of the movie. The camera angles of Aravind Krishna tries to entertain us to engage in the movie shot inside the house and we feel it is repetitive some times.
In spite of the hard work put up by all the actors and the technical team, the movie sticks to our throat mainly due to the characterizations of almost all the main characters, except Mariam. Especially the scenes like Swetha telling Ramsay, ’You did a good thing by killing Mariam’, the rapists make joke of it soon after the murder, and the culprits sing and dance at the police station. We find it very hard to digest these and we wonder what Selvaraghavan tends to tell with these eccentrics.
And we leave the theatre, with a feel ‘Aren’t they mocking on us, the audience?’ Selvaraghavan’s touch is there and style is there, but not for good, this time.
It’s an enjoyable movie for Selvaraghavan fans.
