Thottal Thodarum Review: A Tiring Episode

Something about Thottal Thodarum is vaguely familiar. The voice of actress Arundhati, who plays a call-centre employee Madhu, is particularly striking.

Credits roll; it is Deepa Venkat’s voice-over.

*****

Aside from Deepa’s near-perfect intonations, Thottal Thodarum is a blurry, teary, garbled mess. Director Cable Sankar draws on a popular premise: the lives of four different people intersecting on a day. But where movies of its ilk, like the recent Nerungi Vaa Muthamidathe succeeded, Thottal Thodarum leaves us a little dazed.

It begins on the road. Minister Duraipandian’s huge SUV meets with an accident, but the police suspect it’s orchestrated.

Meanwhile, Madhubala, a call-centre employee is at work, making her routine offers of loan when a chance encounter with a customer leads to long telephone conversations …and romance. She is also the sole breadwinner of her family, much to the chagrin of her frustrated step-mother.

Their lives intersect when Madhu, who is in need of money to finance her brother’s surgery, deliberately plants herself as a target in a murder that is being orchestrated (by the hitmen who bumped off Duraipandian).

…just so that the family could unlock her insurance fund.

Then, Thaman Kumar (as Shiva, a well-placed HR executive) enters the fray. With a weird accent. And, Thottal Thodarum begins flitting between a badly-written murder investigation and an insipid romance.

It commands an impassive audience at best.

Director Cable Sankar audaciously – and without a trace of irony –  calls out ‘tele-serials’, laughing at them and their audience. A pity really, for while the thodarum… on Shankar’s imaginary Atthai Magal could make its followers chew their nails off in anxiety, the movie – at 2.05 hours – is lacklustre.

Save for the evil step-mother.

Oh, the irony.

*****

So, what did we do post interval?

Sought comfort in this other soap opera …with swords.

Read this extremely persuasive theory about why Benjen Stark is really Daario Naharis in disguise.

*****

The Thottal Thodarum Review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have an advertising relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.