I have been seeing the trailer of Puriyatha Puthir (புரியாத புதிர்) for a long time, the film felt as if I had seen it earlier. You can easily identify that the film has been in the making for few years by the slimmer (compared to say Vikram Vedha) Vijay Sethupathi we see. A romantic-thriller directed by Ranjit Jeyakodi. The first part of the film is about the love between Kathir (Vijay Sethupathi), an upcoming music director and Meera (Gayathrie from Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom), a music teacher. The second half is about why Kathir is being blackmailed with “private” pictures of Meera taken without her knowledge, which reminded me of how bad this can be even for a teenage boy from the popular sci-fi show Black Mirror Episode “Shut-up and Dance“. Director has succeeded in telling the untold emotional suffering a lady and her loved ones go through in this age of cameras everywhere, a theme we have seen in Kamal’s Papanasam (2015) and few other films recently.
On screen, Gayathrie with her next-door girl appearance and lesser makeup is a much-needed relief to the skinny and pale white heroines imported to Kollywood, she has played her role, a tough one to show emotions of love, fear and anger well. Kudos. For Vijay Sethupathi the role should have felt like doing table work in an office, with no action or demanding scenes, in most part he reminds in the body language and dialogue delivery his other films, yet in the scenes where he has to show anger and fear together, he shows what he is truly capable of. I enjoyed the first half of the film, the climax came out as a let-down for me. A little amount of care in coming up with a convincing background story would’ve have made Puriyatha Puthir a lot better film.
High-rise apartment complexes where our heroine lives away from her family seems to be a recurring theme in Tamil movie, for few days after watching Taramani (2017) I felt like I was living in one myself.
