Mirage (Malayalam)
Jeethu Joseph’s Mirage, starring Asif Ali and Aparna Balamurali, is one of those thrillers that keeps tossing surprises at you. Except most of them aren’t very surprising.
At its core, the story has the right ingredients — mystery, suspicion, and characters who all seem to be hiding something. A man vanishes, a death raises questions, and secrets slowly tumble out. But the film spends too little time building its characters, leaving us with people we don’t know well enough to care about. Instead, the narrative leans on red herrings to keep the audience guessing — devices that neither deepen the story nor pay off in any meaningful way. So when the big shifts finally arrive, they land without much weight.
To its credit, the opening stretch, where we grapple with Hakim Shahjahan’s character Kiran and the ambiguity around his motivations, does spark curiosity. For a while, the film seems to be setting up something intriguing. Unfortunately, it cannot sustain that interest, quickly slipping into a series of twists for twist’s sake. Big reveals are staged with thundering music and dramatic pauses, even when we’ve spotted some of them from miles away.
The screenplay, which Jeethu has co-written with Srinivasan Abrol from a story by Aparna R Tarakad, is so busy trying to outsmart itself that it forgets to ground its characters in believable drama or tie up loose ends. Characters carry backstories we’ve seen in a dozen other films, and at least a few scenes slip into unintentional comedy. Case in point is a ‘clandestine’ deal that plays out in a bustling café, where one man arrives in a keffiyeh and skull cap as his chosen disguise, and is later joined by another one wearing a full burqa. For master conspirators trying not to draw attention, this is quite the strategy.
To be fair, the film’s final reveal comes as a genuine surprise — but more so because you are jolted by the realisation that the film isn’t over still. By this point, the film has wrung out every ounce of suspense it had, and what should have been a climax plays instead like an afterthought, tacked on to stretch the runtime.
All this wouldn’t be such a problem if the execution were tighter. But instead, the film leans heavily on dialogue that overexplains what we’ve already understood, clunky VFX, and a score that drowns subtlety in noise.
Still, there are bright spots. Aparna Balamurali and Asif Ali, along with supporting actors like Hakim Shahjahan, inject as much life as they can into underwritten parts. Satheesh Kurup’s cinematography keeps things slick, and the soundtrack works mostly well, when it is not burdened with underlining yet another twist. There are moments here and there that manage to engage you, even if only briefly.
But overall, Mirage feels less like a gripping thriller and more like a patchwork of twists strung together, with too little plot in between. It keeps pulling rabbits out of hats, long after you’ve stopped caring what’s inside the hat. It’s watchable, yes, but also instantly forgettable, because you’ve seen these tricks before, executed with far more finesse elsewhere, sometimes by Jeethu himself.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.