Prasanna Vadanam Review

Arjun Y K's concept crime drama has a clever setup: the sole witness to a murder is a man who suffers from face blindness. Surya watches a woman pushed in front of a train haunted by the thought that he would be unable to recognize the killer even if he were staring right at him. Prosopagnosia. It's a real thing. The doctor who diagnoses Surya explains as much for his benefit as for the audience: the head trauma from the car accident that killed his parents and injured his friend Vignesh (Viva Harsha) is permanent and incurable. And as an afterthought, the doctor adds that Surya has Phonagnosia too. Voice blindness. Although this one is more of a plot device than anything else.

Five years into his new life, Surya seems to have adjusted to his unique predicament. He works as an RJ (the voice blindness thing never seems to hinder his job?) hiding his weakness by tracking people's prominent features: hair, tattoos, clothing. For his part, Vignesh gets a streak of hot pink in his hair so Surya knows who his best friend is. But there is still plenty of room for gaffes. Surya runs into the same girl four different times, each time his brain resetting his face folio. The first time he sees Aadya (Payal Radhakrishna), she is doing the stereotypical heroine-has-heart-of-gold bit, helping out an old man. He falls for her. It doesn't matter. Because the next time he sees her, she is once again a stranger to him. They meet each other a few more times, and each time it's a fresh encounter for him, while she gets confused by his hot-and-cold routine.

Surya's illness is not just for comic relief, though - like haha, isn't it cute how he mistakes Aadya for his maid until she too dyes her hair and let's all thank God that he isn't colour blind too. It is also sloppily used when the crime drama part of the plot kicks into gear and Surya is trapped in a murder conspiracy involving killer cops. In the film's most egregious scene, Surya can't tell his friend apart from his killer simply because they are both dressed the same. What about using body-shapes, or skin-colours, or accessories or any of the million other micro-signals that face-blind people use to go about their daily lives? The film will have you thinking that being face blind is the same as being stupid.

As in a lazily-written matinee soap opera, the plot comes together in a series of improbable coincidences. Nothing is earned: even the cigarette Surya nervously puffs on as he tries to escape a bad situation, is something that he picks up on the side of the road. Of course, a matchbox is right there too. Several thoughtless tropes that populate TV serials plod the story along: cars break down at wrong times, a murder gets secretly recorded on tape, road accidents conveniently kill, and magically appear at the right places at the wrong times.

Sometimes, there are odd bits of provocation that seem like nods to Sandeep Reddy Vanga's work: a wet, sordid bathroom fight reminiscent of one in Arjun Reddy. An offhand comment about police SHE teams being a nuisance and by a man prodding a girl to slap a guy.

As the film slow-crawls to the meatier parts of the story, Vaidehi (Rashi Singh), a stern, no-nonsense cop, emerges as one of the film's main draws. Rashi Singh who plays Vaidehi brings a mix of aggression and intensity that would make a prosopagnosic person mistake her for Varalakshmi Sarathkumar. Amid a cast that fails to hold your attention, she is most consistently alluring.

Film history is rich with "superweakness" stories where a protagonist's neurological condition is explored to dramatic effect. Like Christopher Nolan's noir thriller Memento, or the Bourne series - stories about amnesiacs. Or closer to home, Nag Chaitanya's Savyasachi, a crime thriller where the protagonist has vanishing twin syndrome. Such themes come to fruition when the filmmaker is thoughtful about the limits of the illness and yet explores it to maximum dramatic effect, the tonality of such films - the gripping dread of Memento, or the spastic chaos of Bourne - being an all-important element of their DNAs. Yet, here, even with the kick-ass potential of a face-blind protagonist, Prasanna Vadanam is a bland buffet of this and that and everything in between. Nothing sticks in memory. In a scene that may otherwise have been a highlight, Surya is searching for a man named Govind without knowing that he is looking at Govind himself. The tension, diluted by comedy, never builds up to a crescendo, and these two elements cancel each other out to nothingness.

The writing doesn't demand much from its performers. Not even as lead does Suhas have much to work with as the screenplay barely waits for any emotion to be fully-realized before moving along to the next scene. As if it only matters that information is conveyed, with no concern whatsoever for how it is said. One of the film's crucial plot points involves a surrogate mother. But the film doesn't see the need to exhibit any grace towards such a weighty topic. A doctor rolls down her car window when she spots her patient by the side of the road and talks about her egg-count. Tell me if this doesn't remind you of a crass TV serial.

The camera, aloof and uninterested in its characters, just goes through the motions. And so it is with the hammy background score. Prasanna Vadanam feels like a terrible waste of a concept that could have done wonders in the hands of a more assertive filmmaker. Instead, it is indistinguishable from the mass of mediocrity out there.