Review: Immortal Has Fangs, But Needed More Bite

Immortal has a seductive premise and good performances, but this vampire tale could have used a lot more bite, avers Sreeju Sudhakaran.

IMAGE: G V Prakash Kumar and Kayadu Lohar in Immortal.

After Kalyani Priyadarshan bloody owned the box office as the immortal vampire in Lokah, it is time for another bloodsucker to take a bite out of the big screen.

Except, if Lokah‘s Chandra was fighting for the right side, the vampire in Mariyappa Chinna’s debut directorial Immortal harbours some seriously nefarious intentions. Well, like practically any other vampire (who isn’t Chandra or Edward Cullen).

 

The Tale Of The Mysterious Flatmate

Magi (G V Prakash Kumar) is a young man with a roving eye working at his uncle’s printing press. He is in desperate need of a place to stay but simply cannot find anything within his meagre budget.

That is, until he meets the mysterious and beautiful Sindhu (Kayadu Lohar). She lives in a duplex in a posh locality and wants someone to share her accommodation, asking for the exact rent he can comfortably afford.

So utterly allured by her beauty and excited to share a flat with a girl, Magi ignores the fact that she is quite okay with his immediate moving in, no questions asked.

Even as he gets closer to her, he keeps ignoring the glaring red flags until they become impossible to dismiss. Like how she magically knows exactly what he wants to eat, and the order is immediately delivered by the exact same person every time.

Or that she buys him an expensive bike the very next morning after he jokingly asked her for one the previous night.

Or that she claims to have enough money to last a thousand years, yet is still renting out a room in her flat for a mere Rs 5,000.

Or that she completely fails to mention the third person staying in the flat, whom she claims is her grandfather.

By the time Magi realises these red flags are impossible to ignore, it is way too late to escape his new home.

An Interesting Plotline With Good Casting

Premise-wise, Immortal offers a highly interesting subject with the promise of horror sprinkled with eroticism and black humour.

It also gets the casting right. G V Prakash Kumar is pretty convincing as the gullible young man ready to be misled by a woman’s charms.

Meanwhile, Kayadu Lohar, despite her dialogue delivery being slightly off in a couple of places, brings the exact sensuality needed to play the alluring seductress, and works even better as the flatmate from hell.

The initial scenes between Sindhu and Magi, traipsing between romance and lust, are handled nicely without resorting to pure sleaze. Even when Magi is bitten by the lust bug, the screenplay keeps dropping intriguing puzzles about his new lover. He might ignore them, but we simply cannot.

Sure, there is a distinct male gaze in how Sindhu is framed a couple of times. However, I want to give the movie a pass here because it is strictly from Magi’s point of view, and that is exactly how Sindhu wants him to see her.

Inconsistent Writing

A couple of surprises work genuinely well, like the discovery of the third flatmate who has his own grim tale to share, and the tense pre-interval sequence where Magi attempts to escape the house.

Yet, while the writing tantalises, it never completely seduces you despite the obvious potential while leaving quite some questions unanswered. For one, the antagonist is shown to be so incredibly powerful that she can fabricate an entirely believable reality, hear heartbeats and read minds. Yet, there are times when her victims somehow manage to hide from her, which should have been physically impossible.

Also, it is never clear why she keeps two victims in the house at the same time, knowing full well they would communicate the truth to each other. If she genuinely did not care, that would have worked fine. But at one point, she is visibly annoyed by the other person’s presence. Would it not have been smarter to keep that person away completely?

The script also mentions that the demon prefers the blood of a particular group, but why is that the case is never told. Perhaps that is her dietary preference, even vampires might be a sucker for culinary tastes of a peculiar kind.

Immortal might have worked better if it kept the suspense regarding Sindhu’s true reality going a little longer, rather than breaking the illusion right before the midway mark.

Or if it had actually leaned heavier into the horror elements, when it does. Sure, there is a creepy monster roaming around (with quite decent VFX), but the actual scares are practically nil. The movie focuses far more on creating sequence after sequence of Magi slowly realising how hopelessly trapped he is, and that feels repetitive after a point.

Considering how the monster attracts her victims playing with their male desperation, there was this opportunity for the movie to pull off a smart commentary on the same like Jennifer’s Body did (which also revolves around a succubus).

Someone’s Read Harry Potter…

The third-act face-off between Magi and the monster is strictly okayish. It feels a tad unbelievable that he manages to put up such a fight against its sheer might, considering how overwhelmingly powerful she was established to be earlier.

I want to believe the director is a huge Harry Potter fan, particularly of the second book. A few scenes strongly reminded me of The Chamber Of Secrets, like how Magi stumbles upon the creature’s origin story through a memory, along with a specific moment in the final fight that I will not spoil here. If you are or ever used to be a Potterhead, you will instantly spot the similarity.

If you are in the game to draw more plot parallels, you could also draw some with Rahul Sadasivan’s terrific Malayalam hit Bramayugam. Both films features protagonists trapped within a cursed house with a master who refuses to let them leave (one tempted by food and survival, the other by his libido), while there is also another trapped victim who has kind of made peace with his existence.

Except of course, one film is definitely more superior in how it presents the situations. No need for me to mention which one.

Sam CS’ background score ultimately works much better than his songs. Since the majority of the events take place within that mysterious flat, Arun Radhakrishnan’s camerawork ensures plenty of dizzying interior frames that add to the mystique of the place.

Immortal wraps up with a surprisingly clever open ending. It neatly ties back to the creepy prologue set a thousand years before the events of the film, finally clarifying a major doubt I had when a character first revealed the creature’s fable.

By that point, you realise Mariyappa Chinna is undeniably a filmmaker with an eye for outlandish storylines, though he could likely deliver much more with tighter scripts. His first outing certainly had some good ideas for a fun premise, but it never quite makes the most of them.

At best, Immortal would have landed with more impact as a two-episode arc on a horror anthology show. As a feature-length film, though, there simply is not enough compelling mythos or genuine substance to make it a memorable standout.

This one had fangs but needed more bite!

Immortal Review Rediff Rating: