Nadunisi Naigal – Can it get more disappointing?

After having excitedly discussed about buying tickets for the movie – Nadunisi Naigal, the six of us could hardly wait to watch the movie. There were very high expectations from the movie and we had managed to get tickets for the first day show at Satyam at 7p.m.

As planned, we met up at my friend’s office at 6p.m. and off we went to Satyam in an auto. The autowala seemed to be a jerk of sorts- maybe it was some kind of an omen about how the movie would be, as we realized later.

Most of us, I must confess, are not the thriller movie kinds… Romcoms/animations would anyday be a better bet for us. Yet, we decided to try our hands at this one (sigh!)…

We were bang on time- 7 sharp and went in with the supplies of butter popcorn, doughnuts, cakes, coke/fanta etc… Thanks to our supplies that we could sit through what followed for the next 2 hours and can be summarized in a single word – TRASH!

The movie, set in urban Mumbai, begins with showing a lone dad with an 8-year old kid who has made his house a sex hub. The child grows up seeing his dad with a bunch of men and women, who are perennially drunk, do drugs and have sex.

As the kid becomes a teenager, he is also pulled into these activities by his dad. He dreads going home from school and is almost always sleep deprived. When he sleeps, he is nagged by bad dreams.

This is when a new woman neighbor enters the boy, Samar’s life. She finds out that the boy needs help and reports his dad to police. The boy’s dad commits suicide when police try to arrest him. After this, the boy is taken into guard by his nice neighbor – Meenakshi Amma and is rechristened Veera.

As time passes by, the boy falls in love with his guardian and one day ends up having sex with her. She tries to send him away after this, but he clings to her saying she is the only one he has and he would never hurt her. The lady decides to get married to a friend of hers and on their first night, the boy, begins his career as a killer. He stabs the man and sets their room on fire. The man dies and the lady suffers third degree burns. She is shown to be hospitalized and the movie shifts to her Chennai residence thereafter.

The boy grows up lavishly in the money he inherits from his guardian and spends his time surfing/chatting. His first romantic endeavor begins with a happy-go-lucky girl called Sandhya. He invites her home, acts like a lover boy and finally ends up stabbing her on her back and removing some of her hair.

His sexual mania and serial killing (which invariably ends with collecting the hair of the victims), keeps continuing, till he meets his childhood love- Suganya (Sameera Reddy). He is broke to find that she is in love with another guy. He follows them till he finally finds them at a night show in Satyam. Suganya is disturbed seeing her boyfriend gone for such a long time to buy popcorn. She calls his number in vain and finally gets out of the theatre to find him. She finds Veera there, who convinces her that her boyfriend eloped with another girl. Finding her emotionally down, he offers her a lift and instead of dropping her home, starts misbehaving with her. Trying to make her escape out of his car, she finds the dead body of her boyfriend in the car’s boot. A guy in Santro follows Veera’s car and understands there is something fishy about it and reports it to the police.

Suganya gets stabbed on her stomach trying to escape and the police arrest Veera. But Veera outsmarts the police, escapes and takes away Suganya from the hospital to his residence. The next half an hour or so of the movie shows how Suganya suffers at his place. The Santro guy, who sees Veera’s car for a second time, smells suspicion and follows Veera to his place. He rings the police and in his attempt to find out what is happening inside the house, ends up being devoured by Veera’s dogs.

We, the audience, expectantly stare at the screen wishing the police would arrive and the drama would get over. But that’s when the movie’s so called uninteresting twist happens. Suganya finds out that Veera suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder Syndrome. He thinks he is talking to his guardian Meenakshi Amma, but in reality, there is nobody else living in that house other than him.

Suganya finally makes a desperate run outside the house. Veera narrates to her how much he loves her- in his dual personality, one genteel and one murderous. Meanwhile, the police are shown to have arrived outside the gate. But, even the police look retarded. Suganya fights and fights with this guy and yells – Help, Help!, and yet nobody comes to her aid. When Veera calls out to his dog Tyson, four blood thirsty dogs show up, all alerted against Suganya and the police (One is left wondering if the dogs too have some sort of split personality disorder).He then throws her into a cell where two other girls who have been abused by Veera are shown chained in a pathetic condition with some of their hair shaven. He shaves some of Suganya’s hair too. And then she escapes once again as he moves out to face the police. Finally, the frightened looking Police officer enters the house, and thanks to Suganya, he succeeds in arresting Veera. The audience is left wondering about the abilities of Police, but reconcile to the fact that the psychopath is finally arrested.

The narrative ends with the police officer meeting up a Neurologist who speaks elaborately about Multiple Personality Disorder. After listening to Veera’s story, the police officer and the audience sort of feel dazed, as nobody is left with patience of listening to his autobiography, which sounds very redundant. The movie begins with this narrative which runs throughout the thread and in the climax, is starts all over again when Veera begins saying – how he was abused as an 8 year old and we can’t help but yelling – NO! NOT AGAIN!!

Veera finally ends up in an asylum where Samanta is shown as a fellow-patient suffering from a similar problem due to a troubled childhood and they are shown to be drooling at each other…: S

All in all, there was no story whatsoever. The film is very loosely woven. It felt extremely redundant with the Hero continuously alluring, abusing and murdering good-looking females. Women have been shown to be extremely vulnerable to such abuse. The Police is shown in extremely bad light- Dumb, to be precise. The climax has so much drag that one feels like getting out of the movie theatre right away. Some scenes looked as if they were shot in a camera phone (the scene in which a police officer is shown standing outside the hospital room where Suganya is admitted).

To summarize, what could have been made a sensible, interesting and socially-enlightening plot, was shown as a dumb, disgusting, extremely disappointing movie by Gautam Vasudev Menon! Wonder if this one too has some semi-autobiographical touch of the director…