Mercury Hindi Movie

Feature Film | 2018 | Thriller
Critics:
Four lads and a girl are at a school reunion and are happily partying when they accidentally run over someone. They find themselves trapped in an old abandoned factory at the mercy of a madman. The terror is doubled because the protagonists are speech and hearing impaired. It's an interesting experiment but the loud background music fails many, many times. As does the overacting.
Apr 12, 2018 By Manisha Lakhe


When you have an actor who is famous for his dance abilities and play the good guy in the movies suddenly choose to play a mad killer, then the director must show him as a victim so as to please his audience. Alas, we don't know how to make horror film without being apologetic about evils and horror. Someone did something bad to him and he goes postal, an evil force takes over the man's body and makes him kill. Nothing is his fault. Bad Hollywood horror films also do the same, some satanic entity or demon takes over the good guy and... (you guess the rest!)


Here, the town suffers from deaths from Mercury poisoning. As Google will explain, children exposed to Mercury poisoning will suffer from visual, speech and hearing impairments. So we are introduced to four young men and a young woman who are speech and hearing impaired at their school reunion. At night they party like crazy with loud music and alcohol at a bungalow they have rented. Before you ask why play music loudly when you cannot hear a thing, why gift a watch that also doubles as a music box when you cannot hear it at all, they're all being terrorised by a madman.


Prabhu Deva plays this madman and there are some genuinely scary moments in the film. As are all movie scenes where characters hide from Velociraptors, where they are being hunted down by aliens or sharks even. And we are scared for the characters, whether it is the girl stuck in The Shallows, or the madman in Cloverfield. But in this film, so reminiscent of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Ramsey Brothers' Khooni Murda does not enamor us to the characters. You don't care for their deaths because they deserve it somewhat. So the odd color processed film (mostly green, I thought) may create an eerie atmosphere, but not empathy.


Plus the background music is so loud you want to turn down the volume. It has been touted as a silent film (an homage to Kamalahaasan's Pushpak), but it is deafening. And releasing it at the same time when the fabulous A Quiet Place is playing in the theatres, is plain bad timing. Then they add a moral science/save the environment lesson to the whole thing which is an overkill.

Manisha Lakhe

   

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