Mirage Review | The Twists in This Thriller Depend on Shock Value Rather Than Coherence

Jeethu Joseph is a director whose movies have a dependence on dialogue to convey a lot of things. If you look at Drishyam, it is Georgekutty manipulating multiple people by literally saying a different date that forms the foundation of the whole misleading tactic. When it comes to Mirage, somewhere Jeethu Joseph is trying to recreate the DNA of his other thrillers like Drishyam and Memories. That pattern of putting one more twist when you sort of think that we have finally found the person. However, the problem is that, while his other thrillers managed to have a wow factor by doing something we won’t really think, here the twists have a contrived feel. The efforts to make it surprising were somehow making the idea more and more generic.

Aswin is an independent journalist who is trying to run an online media house that shows facts rather than spiced-up truth. So at one point, he happens to know about the death of an employee in a financial firm. There were certain mysteries around that character, which made Aswin interested in the Story, and he decided to help this girl named Abhirami, who was the fiancée of the deceased man. The journey of Aswin and Abhirami to find out the bigger truth is what we see in Mirage.

At one point in the movie, when Abhirami goes to the police station, she narrates her equation with her fiancé, and the police man literally says, Your Story feels like a clichéd movie Story. Knowingly or unknowingly, I would say that character sort of reviewed the movie in my opinion. From the beginning of the movie itself, if you are familiar with thriller movies, you can expect two twists, and before the interval itself, the screenplay tries to reveal them as a big thing. When the second half begins and you sort of get the new twist that had no foreshadowing in the earlier half, you would hope the movie would take a different turn. But one twist after another, we feel less of “wow” and more of “ehh?” with this movie. It was almost like they were planting twists for the shock value, and the efforts to make them logical felt very forced. It was like a big-scale version of those North Indian romantic reels where you see twists after twists about who cheated on whom.

Asif Ali as Aswin is pretty much convincing, and it has these shades of his previous characters, where he has to convince people because he looks like a fraudulent guy. There are multiple shades to the character which we experience as the Story becomes intense, and in my opinion, Asif was the only one who was able to deliver the textbook dialogues in the most natural way possible. Aparna Balamurali has the responsibility of keeping her character in that naive zone. Even though she did that part neatly, the decision on a screenplay level to keep that character in that innocent space feels unconvincing. Hakkim Shahjahan is in some ways a victim of his own filmography. When you watch the movie, you will sort of get what I mean. Hannah Reji Koshy can’t really conceal the real character of the character given to her. Deepak Parambol, trying to crack a deal by saying English lines, was one of the most unintentionally comical moments in the movie.

Like I said in the beginning, one of the most off-putting elements in the screenplay is the way they were trying to spoon-feed the audience. There is a tendency to overexplain characters by giving them lines. And like what I said about the character played by Deepak Parambol, there are many moments in the movie where the conversations are serious, the background score is intense, but because of the way over-explaining, reassuring English lines come in the Story, you would find it a little funny. Jeethu Joseph has a soft corner for these large-scale, fake single shots done using green screens. The one in memories is a classic example, and here also, he tries to do that. Even though there is a significant improvement in the quality, it still feels very gimmicky and unnecessary. The cinematography is very much on the agile side, as there are too many chasing and fighting sequences.

There is one character who is the right-hand of the villain. In the beginning, when he shows up with a firearm, you would sense that fear. However, as the movie progressed, his taking his gun out became almost comical, and finally, when he fired, it was almost like how Innocent’s character fired in Vettam’s climax. Mirage is a movie where they are constantly trying to impress you by doing something that looks startling; unfortunately, due to the familiarity, it just feels either bland or overdone.