Review: MERCURY

Mercury Didn't Rise

2 stars

Mini Review:

Four lads and a girl are at a school reunion and are happily

partying when they accidentally run over someone. They

find themselves trapped in an old abandoned factory at the

mercy of a madman. The terror is doubled because the

protagonists are speech and hearing impaired. It’s an

interesting experiment but the loud background music fails

many, many times. As does the overacting.

Main Review:

When you have an actor who is famous for his dance abilities and

plays the good guy in the movies suddenly choose to play a mad

killer, then the director must show him as a victim so as to please

his audience. Alas, we don’t know how to make horror film without

being apologetic about evils and horror. Someone did something

bad to him and he goes postal, an evil force takes over the

man’s body and makes him kill. Nothing is his fault. Bad

Hollywood horror films also do the same, some satanic entity or

demon takes over the good guy and… (you guess the rest!)

Here, the town suffers from deaths from Mercury poisoning. As

Google will explain, children exposed to Mercury poisoning will

suffer from visual, speech and hearing impairments. So we are

introduced to four young men and a young woman who are

speech and hearing impaired at their school reunion. At night they

party like crazy with loud music and alcohol at a bungalow they

have rented. Before you ask why play music loudly when you

cannot hear a thing, why gift a watch that also doubles as a music

box when you cannot hear it at all, they’re all being terrorised

by a madman.

Prabhu Deva plays this madman and there are some genuinely

scary moments in the film. As are all movie scenes where

characters hide from Velociraptors, where they are being hunted

down by aliens or sharks even. And we are scared for the

characters, whether it is the girl stuck in The Shallows, or the

madman in Cloverfield. But in this film, so reminiscent of I Know

What You Did Last Summer and Ramsey Brothers’ Khooni

Murda does not enamor us to the characters. You don’t care for

their deaths because they deserve it somewhat. So the odd color

processed film (mostly green, I thought) may create an eerie

atmosphere, but not empathy.

Plus the background music is so loud you want to turn down the

volume. It has been touted as a silent film (an homage to

Kamalahaasan’s Pushpak), but it is deafening. And releasing it

at the same time when the fabulous A Quiet Place is playing in

the theatres, is plain bad timing. Then they add a (I'm gagging)

moral science/save the environment lesson to the whole

thing which is an overkill.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)