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This is an archive article published on February 16, 2024

Siren movie review: Jayam Ravi’s latest is decent as a thriller, dragged down by its ‘packaging’

Siren movie review: Jayam Ravi’s film is tolerable as a thriller, with some good ideas. Take them out and it is a regular revenge drama with the same old flashback sequences.

Rating: 2 out of 5
Siren Movie Review: Jayam Ravi's latest is let down by dated treatmentSiren Movie Review: Jayam Ravi's latest is let down by dated treatment (Image: Poster of Siren)

Packaging is an odd word that keeps getting associated with cinema. A story or a great script never cuts; it needs to be ‘packaged’ with a message, a few songs, some action sequences, and perhaps some comedy — irrespective of their quality. It doesn’t matter if the packaging becomes a deadweight pulling down the decent story that the director or the writer began with. It betrays makers’ distrust of their own story, which eventually kills it. The new victim of this phenomenon indigenous to Tamil cinema is Siren.

“The funny thing is – on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook,” Andy tells this wickedly-funny line to Red in Shawshank Redemption (1994). Perhaps, the same could be said of Thialakan (Jayam Ravi) in Siren. A convict, wrongfully sentenced for murdering his wife and his alleged lover, chooses to opt for parole after a lot of persuasion from the police officers themselves, who deem him to be a model prisoner. All these years, he wore the facade of a demi-saint only to get an opportunity to execute his secret mission of avenging the people who put him there, and of course, who murdered his wife. It was engaging that Thilakan’s intentions and actions, though not guarded as one big secret, were revealed as the film went on. From the start, the audience is well aware of the fact that he is onto something. There’s no pretention here as director Antony Bhagyaraj respects the audience. Despite making it obvious, the film was largely engaging because of the pace, and that is also why the contrivances don’t stick out. However, Siren works only as long as it is about Thilakan, his killing spree, his tricks, modus operandi, and etc, with police officer Nandini (Keerthy Suresh) on his trail.

On the other hand, whenever Siren tries to be the quintessential emotional drama about Thilakan and his estranged teen daughter (Yuvina Parthavi), who detests her father for being a murderer, the film is a bundle of clichés. Emotions indeed play a major role in a revenge story like Siren. But when such scenes are just redundant tear-jerkers, and when the sappy BGM, not the scene itself, begins to tell you how to feel, it becomes obvious that all of this is part of that perfunctory packaging. For instance, the scenes showing the daughter’s anger towards his father is horribly written. We don’t get a solid moment that brings out her predicament of being the daughter of a murderer. Instead, the director resorts to the dated scenes of her getting bullied at school. And we get that more than once. Yuvina Parthavi’s exaggerated acting doesn’t help either.

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The problems with Siren don’t stop there. We have songs and fights which have no reason to exist. A film that bats for progressiveness has a celebratory song when the teenage daughter attains puberty. Then we have a chase sequence involving Thilakan trying to take his dying wife to the hospital in his ambulance. Now, the wife gets stabbed by the villains. For reasons unknown, they wait till Ravi’s arrival, wait some more till he gets her to the ambulance, and start chasing him the moment he starts the vehicle. There isn’t anything novel about the chase either. And that begs the question, what is the point of the illogical chase at all? The only sensible explanation is that it exists just to massage of the ego of the star, and of course, the packaging! As part of the package, it is only fair we get a good social message too. What we get out of Siren is that: ‘Say no to casteism’. With films like Siren, which try to do all at once, it is hard to tell whether the writers and directors genuinely care about such issues or exploit them because it is in trend.

Siren Movie Cast: Jayam Ravi, Keerthy Suresh, Samuthirakani, Yogi Babu
Siren Movie Director: Antony Bhagyaraj
Siren Movie Indian Express Rating: 2

Kirubhakar Purushothaman is a Principal Correspondent with Indian Express and is based out of Chennai. He has been writing about Tamil cinema and a bit about OTT content for the past eight years across top media houses. Like many, he is also an engineer-turned-journalist from Tamil Nadu, who chose the profession just because he wanted to make cinema a part of his professional life.   ... Read More

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