July 7, 2014

Four kids go missing in a zoo. There is a gargantuan snake on the loose inside the grounds. The kids are speech and hearing impaired and so finding them is doubly difficult. Meanwhile, there's a media circus outside the place. With a plot like this, all we expect is a tense thriller (with a bit of satire and dry humour) but Enna Satham Intha Neram is tone-deaf. Rather than be a thriller, it wants to be a comedy (hey, after all, that's the trend, … read the rest.

Four kids go missing in a zoo. There is a gargantuan snake on the loose inside the grounds. The kids are speech and hearing impaired and so finding them is doubly difficult. Meanwhile, there's a media circus outside the place. With a plot like this, all we expect is a tense thriller (with a bit of satire and dry humour) but Enna Satham Intha Neram is tone-deaf. Rather than be a thriller, it wants to be a comedy (hey, after all, that's the trend, right?) and what we get is a dumb film that passes silliness for comedy and implausibility for thrills.

One scene in particular highlights everything that is wrong with this film. We are told that the kids might try to find a way out by climbing over an electric fence. So, the zoo keeper and the kid's school teacher rush to turn off the power while the director cross-cuts between their attempt and the kids climbing the wall. This is the Jurassic Park moment of the film and we must be experiencing nail-biting tension. But the scene is so insipidly written and staged that the moment barely makes any impact.

The characters are as inept as the writing — incompetent zoo keepers, incompetent cops, incompetent school staff, and, yes, even an incompetent snake that cannot kill a prey even if it stands before it! Some of the characters are also major irritants as well — a TV news journalist who will never be let within a mile of a mike, a zoo keeper who cracks the blandest PJs when he is supposed to be searching for the children (Poor Nithin Sathyaa is made to do things that you normally associate with Premgi Amaren).

In fact, no adult character is serious about finding the kids. Right till the climax, instead of actually doing something, everyone keeps talking about mundane matters — the journalist talks about the impending divorce of the kids' parents, a minister comes in only to expose the journalist's sleazy side, a Blue Cross official tells the cops not to harm the snake, the zoo keeper and the school teacher fight over sleeping tablets... It would have been better if the snake had swallowed one of these annoying characters.

The only sensible beings in the film are the kids themselves, and they seem more than capable of taking care of themselves, despite their age and disabilities — when one of them falls in a pit, they rescue her all by themselves, intelligently signal their location with balloons, and even use the tab that they have to find their way out of the place. And, it is only for them that you even endure the film.

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