‘Maruthi Nagar Police Station’ movie review

Varalaxmi Sarathkumar in ‘Maruthi Nagar Police Station’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Dayal Padmanabhan’s Maruthi Nagar Police Station begins with the kidnap of a schoolgirl. The parents of the girl seek the help of the police but the cop, who is in cahoots with the kidnappers, advises the parents to give him what he wants — their land. The parents reluctantly file a complaint and return home to find the extortionist, Pallavaram ‘Potlam’ Naga, eating at their dining table. Upon seeing the parents, Naga, with a straight face, says, “ Ponnu kaanaama pona veetla, kari meen ah irukkum? Adhaan, naane upma panni saapten” [In a house where the daughter has gone missing, I understand if there isn’t meat. So, I made some upma for myself.] I just burst out laughing. The situation is so… hilariously absurd. For a moment, I expected the film to be a Soodhu Kavvum-type black comedy.

But as the film progressed, I painfully realised it was unintended humour as the intended jokes evoke as much laughter as a funeral procession. Sample: A guy named Suresh comes to the police station to complain about his missing dog named Ramesh. Ramesh-Suresh… get it? You are not laughing yet? Here’s another one: A cop tells another cop, “When a dog is lost, the owner files a complaint. But when the owner goes missing, has a dog ever filed a complaint? What a mystery!” The cop, to be fair, is shown as a PJ-cracking boomer. But why even devote screentime for these things in a murder mystery instead of focusing on creating tension and thrill?

The film suffers from a wafer-thin plot and shallow characters. The whole story pivots around the death of Jaishankar (played by Mahat Raghavendra), an orphan for whom his friends, including his girlfriend Archana (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar), are his family. We get a montage song of them growing up in an orphanage and later, as adults, pulling pranks at each other and doing other cliched cute things. But this hardly does anything to sympathise with Jaishankar or empathise with his friends, who want to avenge his death.

A lot of the information is not just spoon-fed, they are spoon-thrust to us. Every time something seemingly unexpected happens, we get a flashback that patronisingly explains the sequence of events like an uncle deconstructing a rudimentary magic trick to his five-year-old nephew. For reasons unfathomable, the film pauses for a second on some eight or nine occasions to establish the time and date. This serves no real purpose other than to break the flow of the narration. In one instance, a character literally says “Come meet me at my office tomorrow at 7 pm.” In the next shot, there’s text on the screen informing us, “Next Day, 7 pm.”

Dayal, who has also written the film, attempts a non-linear narration but that hardly helps in making the proceedings engaging. The back-and-forth storytelling results in frustration rather than intrigue. The plot twists lack any sense of surprise or ingenuity. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent who the culprit is, making the supposed twists feel forced and unexciting. Archana and her friends plan on killing the murderers of Jaishankar. But someone else does it before them. This happens at the halfway mark of the film. The second half is about finding out who did it and why; both revelations feel flatter than a warm fizzless soda on a summer afternoon.

The expository-heavy dialogues are clichéd and uninspired, failing to deliver the sharp and witty exchanges expected in a whodunnit thriller. The performances, too, fail to elevate the underwritten characters. It’s just difficult to care for any of them in this whodunnit. Or, I-don’t-care-whodunnit.

Maruthi Nagar Police Station is currently streaming on Aha