Irul Review (2023)

We Have a Story about a Serial Killer which is written by Novelist Alex and when he and Archana go for a weekend getaway, they are trapped with a stormy weather in a house with a stranger. What happens with the stranger forms the rest of this absolutely clueless, directionless film where events take place for seemingly no reason. The Writing is an utter waste. The Pre Car breakdown sequences are simply filler content where we see Soubin Shahir’s Alex talk about nightmares that he is feeling consecutively which have no connect to what happens in the film going forward. Nor Does the fact that Darshana Rajendran’s character Archana is continuously busy with Cases as High Court Lawyer. Nor Does the Fact that Alex puts forth a condition to not bring phones which it is revealed is itself broken by him.

Being in stark contrast to Hitchcock’s theory of showing close-ups of only those things that might play an important role in the narrative, the film spends time on things absolutely unnecessary such as the opening stretch mentioned above. The film is prevented from sinking by the acting of the only three characters in the film notwithstanding the dead body of a victim. Fahadh Faasil, Darshana Rajendran and Soubin Shahir give great performances though Soubin feels a bit out of place in a role which is poorly, poorly and really poorly written. Alex prevents Archana from calling the police but also says he is innocent but also does shady stuff so far as to putting a gun on her also. It isn’t helped by the fact that the way he acts clearly paints him as a shady guy in contrast to Fahadh Faasil who acts quite brilliantly as another guy caught in this “mystery”. He is quite endearing when he puts an act as a thief who was just trying to steal in the house and his attempts to dissuade Alex from Archana is great to watch. Archana herself is a poorly defined character, who while actually is a lawyer, is not given any amount of courage or bravery and remains only a meek observer of the film’s proceedings. In fact the beautiful cinematography, the setting and lighting and in fact the direction; all set up a mysterious film but it is not supported in the slightest by the writing which betrays a sense of laziness and lack of interest with the only possible interesting thing being that the serial killer on whom Alex based his novel on meets them in real life. The writing throws all kinds of red herrings to distract the audience that the red herrings together themselves could have made a good film.