Turns into the right direction
U Turn was one of the movies pending in the list for a really long time. As my affinity towards horror movies are really less (thanks to all the Nayantara movies), I was trying to postpone it time and again. Also did a mistake of thinking ‘Game Over’ to be ‘U Turn’ and watched the movie in between. I had to pass a lot of time in between as I also watched Maya. Watching horrors back to back is totally pointless for me. So, decided to do it out of the blue when I’m in a lull in that category so finally I got to watch ‘U Turn’ as it satisfied all the criteria.
My next decision was to whether watch the original Kannada one or the Tamil one. Even though I had the Tamil movie with me I was contemplating further because the Kannada movie was readily available online too. Kannada had Shraddha and Tamil had Samantha. I’m a Samantha fan but I like Shraddha too who did a fabulous job in ‘Nerkonda Parvai’. But the thing about ‘U Turn’ was there was not much comparisons between the two movies, no one regretted they watched Tamil version and no one really called out loud for Kannada version too. Maybe it was plot driven and had less to do with the language. So, it kind of worked in both languages without any comparison. Finally, thanks to my affinity towards the language as well as the heroine, I decided to watch the Tamil version.
The movie started playing tricks right from scene one with an inverted camera over the median which then becomes linear post a point where the median is disturbed. If it had been direct first and then got inverted, it’d not have worked like how it was. Right after the title we get to see an interesting long shot in auto. Easily breaks the monotony of shot one and gives us a feel that it’s a movie with nothing scary. Thanks to the bright lighting, we don’t get a feel of eeriness post the opening shot. Also, the problem with most of the horror movies would be the first few minutes it spends on investing the characters. Some movies directly get to the point but with some movies the twists and turns starts only after a few minutes. Here it was the latter. The first twenty minutes or so really worked, it was nice and jovial and cute to watch it. Samantha’s voice is naturally sexy so it was sweet to hear.
Once the plot starts, it gets interesting further. The first half was fabulous even though most of the twists were guessable. The only farfetched twist was the one where Aditya (Rahul Ravindran) changes bike in the flyover. Apart from that and a meek climax, it was worthy watch.
What could have been done better was to make the police station, lockup etc. more interesting, add some realism to it. It was too cute a police station to be and characters were white and black. Maybe we got too used to the cunningness of policemen in other films so it was sweet here. But it acts like a hindrance here. Police, police station, traffic police, the video they see and all look like set pieces. I have not seen a clearer video of traffic through CCTV. It was like videos people would make for short films. If the police station had to be polished, it better had looked like a GVM movie or may be had got raw like a Mysskin or Vetrimaaran movie. It was neither both and looked unreal.
Apart from that it was a largely satisfying movie and Samantha had done a neat job by not overdoing anything and still be vulnerable. As much as we should be happy to see women centric movies, I’m afraid they’re being used only for horror movies because it’s easier to show them vulnerable. Why not a hero could act as vulnerable person in a horror movie. Wish men who couldn’t solve the problem and shown as affected persons would act as protagonists in horror movies and women get better movies than this horror, feminist stuffs.
constantscribbles 