Suriya's Scene review: Jithu Madhavan serves up career-best in cop-and-killer narrative
Starring Suriya and Naslen in lead roles, Madhavan gives a twist to the familiar investigative killer genre by not trying to either excuse or explain his serial killer’s psyche and behaviour.
Suriya shines in Jithu Madhavan's Scene
Investigative thrillers are one of the most exhausted genres in cinema. And within the segment, plots centred around serial killers are none too rare either. And yet director Jithu Madhavan uses the genre to turn in what can easily be considered his career-best presentation with Scene. How? By wisely deciding to not give his ‘killer’ any moral plea — someone who believes they are doing a social clean-up — or even the excuse of a suppressed trauma, an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a murder fetish or sadistic attitude, the usual reasons used to explain a killer’s psyche.
Instead, Scene follows an out-of-job cop, Inbaraj, whose methods are questionable and abilities disapproved. When he suspects a copycat killer who uses the same modus operandi as one of the many accused that he had previously imprisoned, Inbaraj (played by Suriya) goes on a wild goose chase. How he eventually solves the case with police help is what Scene is all about. Madhavan is not new to dark humour; he has exhibited his excellence previously in films like Romancham, a dark comedy with a supernatural twist, and Aaavesham, a comedy-gangster film. Here he allows himself to indulge in it again.
Jithu Madhavan’s three dragons
Anyone familiar with the world of memes will know the viral three dragons (a sketch of the reel monster King Ghidorah by artist Michael J Larsen, many versions of which are flooding the internet). If Madhavan’s Scene were to be placed on that three-dragon template, the film’s dark humour would be the first dragon.
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Suriya is the second, bringing to life the highly-energetic but vulnerable Inbaraj, a crime-solving genius, with Sherlock Holmes-level attention to detail. Suriya knows when to shine on screen and when to hold himself back. When Maya, played by Nazriya, a highly capable and skilled ‘eye’ to the cop, has to substitute for Inbaraj in a dapper, street-fight sequence, he plays the jester. But Suriya is incredible in an action sequence towards the end, making him shine the strongest of the lot.
Jithu Madhavan’s third and long-standing dragon is Sushin Shyam. His background score is just as fresh as the story itself. The placement of ‘Aeroplane,’ sung by Gana Bala, is unexpected and super creative.
On the killer’s trail
Naslen as ‘Eeswaran’ is brilliant as a creepy, psycho killer, and he, luckily for the movie, does the heavy lifting in the first part of the film, which otherwise falls flat. The director takes his time setting the stage, but there’s not one dull moment when Eeswaran is on screen. The film doesn’t really explain what pushed him into becoming a killer or his motives.
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Scene’s objective is to narrate a crime thriller in a cheerful, casually cool way. It assembles an unstable team of highly dysfunctional experts (Inbaraj’s team includes a person struggling with dementia, a partially-blind person and a raging alcoholic) in a fight to bring down an overconfident Eeswaran, who constantly tries to outwit the cop.
Suriya and Naslen meet each other many times in the course of the film, each encounter more intense and entertaining than the last, and these are some of the best moments of Scene.
There are multiple references to other characters Suriya has played in his career (it’s almost like a star film is incomplete without at least one meta reference), but they don’t stick out. In fact, it's often many of these small things that make Scene a pleasant watch.
