SIRI
Directed by Yogeshwara Gopal | Review by Moumita Deb
SIRI belongs to that relatively new genre of psychological thriller stories, built around the notion that someone very close to you can harbor diabolic plans to ruin you completely while feigning to be a perfect friend. There have been instances of crazy stepfathers, nannies, roommates, husbands and adopted children, and now, the dreaded boyfriend.
The director has a fine sense of shading in depicting a slightly psycho-possessive stalker. The most challenging aspect of this movie is the way it has demonized and dehumanized some of its characters in order to produce the desired effect, which brutalizes the spectator’s perspective along with the story and characters. If you can accept this limitation, this is a very efficient piece of machinery to be watched.
The spectacle of how one-man snaps, once he can’t get what he wants and will go to great lengths in his mind games, indeed leaves us stunned.
The scintillating background score in the opening credits, syncs artfully with the early morning cityscape, suggestive of the usual humdrum of urbane life you're about to watch, and sets in the rs perfect mood that the movie aims for.
Crafted as one of the most gripping plots, the movie sincerely avoids a tough inspection of troubling emotional speeds and stunted communication to sneeze out a confused, half-realized story of fatal and destructive obsession.
The film begins as an unyielding look at an emotionally shattered wife, undergoing the agony and trauma of betrayal, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the vengeance seeking victim mercilessly toys with her tormentor, and on the wider sphere with the sentiments of the audience.
But hold on. Put yourself in Bhavya’s shoes. You're alone in a house and terrified that you may have been tracked by your dead husband, or constantly in mortal fear of being stalked. What do you do? Live with this terrifying fear or face it unconditionally to release yourself from the self-created hell. And then there's the obligatory scene at the end where it turns out a dead man isn't dead after all.
After the countless dreary times since then when the nightmarish hallucinations have appeared disappeared and reappeared along with the sinister mobile call alerts, SIRI is a movie that assuredly seems to have greatness in its grasp and goes straight beyond the mundane.
It's the sort of movie where all of the characters and plot moves, are tailored to the thriller mechanics and have no existence apart from their crude functionality.
A film competently made, SIRI triumphs on broadly drawn characters and a plot that's certainly not much too obvious but thrillingly and refreshingly twisted at every crossroad.
"SIRI" is out and out a spellbinding psychological thriller and can indeed be designated as a great movie, as the filmmakers have not thrown character and plausibility to the winds but have thrived entirely on believable situations in the domain of twisted relationships.
As far as the performance is concerned, the film's potential for greatness has never been compromised. The movie explores many avenues of the intricacies of a relationship within the social periphery. Although the filmmakers clearly have the intelligence to harmonically blend the themes, the final scene of the movie collapses into pathetic melodrama.
The first two-thirds of that film also are psychologically sound and dramatically fascinating, and the movie never degenerates into a canned formula of violence.
SIRI tries to expose a story too terrifying to resist, a crackling, tension-packed thriller hinged on the triangle of a man, a wife and vengeful "other man." This scary box-office smash grab holds early-then tops itself with an unforgettably nerve-jolting finale.
The film brims with atmosphere and menace. The climax is terrifying with a pinch of realism.
Passion, obsession, mad love, the violent clash of insider and outsider-all these themes, plus the performances, are rich enough to carry us past that nerve-jolting climax.
Regardless of how fearsome or eccentric Bhavya eventually turns out to be, I find her quite fascinating throughout. Her absolutely riveting performance makes SIRI an unforgettable cinema experience. She allows for moments when you actually do feel for her, no matter how manipulative she gets with time, Bhavya indeed, did a great job in the movie. We could touch her weird feelings, and her extreme mental troubles.
SIRI provides a perfect example of how to scare an audience even when the audience knows what's to be expected. It also offers a well-detailed, credibly drawn romantic triangle that's sure to spark a lot of cocktail-party chatter.
