Artistes, in many ways, are hyenas who pick the bones clean of every life experience. Talk to anyone whose job it is to tell stories and they will confess that a part of their mind is always occupied in changing what's happening around them into a narrative. The fiction they create is often real life stories they've mutilated or transformed to suit their purpose. Debut director Barath Neelakantan's K13 is an attempt to capture this obsession which can sometimes border on desperation.
The film opens with a "puriyatha puthir". Director Madhiazhagan (Arulnithi) finds himself strapped to a chair with duct tape. In the flat - number K13 - is a dead woman he partied with the previous night, writer Malarvizhi (a stunning Shraddha Srinath doing slightly anachronistic writerly things like flinging paper - where's her laptop?!). How did he get there and why is she dead? If you, like me, thought about the statistical improbability of two people named Madhiazhagan and Malarvizhi meeting in a glitzy Chennai club, there is an explanation. Something to do with Kollywood's love for naming heroines Yazhini and such like. It's a little detail that I thought about and smiled when the film drew to an end.
Madhiazhagan can walk out of the apartment if he wants but what if someone sees his blood-stained clothes and he gets into trouble? The screenplay effectively builds the tension in the first half, along with Sam CS's background score, as different factors complicate Madhi's exit from the flat. With Shraddha playing dead for half the film, it falls upon Arulnithi to make us invested in the plot and the actor pulls it off despite the somewhat clunky lines that he gets to mouth, talking to a corpse about his love for cinema. It's a premise rich for black comedy but the script doesn't exaggerate the circumstances enough for it.
As the unreliable narrator of this nightmare, Madhi is still woozy and the story comes to us from his perspective, the camera going blurry at times to put us in his shoes. He may belong to the cinema world, but he isn't the infallible hero who knows everything about everything. Barath does well in showcasing the practical inconvenience of finding yourself in a murder scene; Madhi can hardly open a drawer without worrying about the fingerprints that he'll leave behind. He isn't your Kollywood hero who can shoot five goons in broad daylight and leave behind zero forensic evidence.
You find yourself looking for plausible explanations for what's happening, along with Madhi. Did someone kill Malar or did she kill herself? Yogi Babu is hilarious in the one scene that he gets as the plot throws up suspects. There are a few visual clues for the audience to pick on, but these have no depth beyond the obvious and don't allow us to indulge in a delicious guessing game along with Madhi. The best thrillers invite the audience to crack the mystery along with the protagonist, giving us vital clues disguised as seemingly unimportant details. K13 does not have these little rewarding moments of unraveling when you feel your spine prickling, the secrets are told rather than discovered. It saves it all up for the big reveal in the denouement, when the straightforward story suddenly makes a U-turn, and... meets with partial success.
This isn't because the ending is too unreal; as they say, truth is stranger than fiction and there have been real life precedents for the actions of K13's protagonist. It's the hurried staging of the final sequence which leaves you wanting more, though you make the connections that the director wants you to make - yes, we noticed the earring. Cerebrally, it all makes sense and you want to revisit the film with the knowledge that you now have. But you also can't shake off the feeling of being cheated of a more fleshed out, satisfying end.
There's more than one meta-narrative in K13, the first is where the story takes you and the second is about the newbie struggle to make it big in Kollywood. It's a clever idea for a debut director to play with - and perhaps too clever by half to win us over entirely.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the series/film. TNM Editorial is independent of any business relationship the organisation may have with producers or any other members of its cast or crew.