The Road

Twenty minutes into The Road, it seems reasonable to expect Trisha’s latest tohave some fresh tricks up its sleeves to glue you to your seats. There’s a sense of ease and a hint of urgency in how writer-director Arun Vaseegaran introduces his characters, which usually promises the making of a thriller with a specific atmosphere. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case with The Road. Just as she’s about to start another journey as a mother, independent journalist Meera’s (Trisha) world turns to dust when her loving husband Anand (Santhosh Pratap) and her sweet little son Kavin are killed in a freak road accident on their way to Kanyakumari. The shock puts her in a two-week coma, just enough time and reason to shift our focus to Mayazhagan a.k.a Maya (Shabeer Kallarakkal), a young college professor who is devastated by a shocking turn of events that follows the constant harassment he is subjected to from a female student with an unhealthy obsession over him. Maya’s story is told parallel to that of Meera’s in a bid to do away with the routine flashback you’d expect — an ineffective technique as the beginning of Maya’s story is not only ridiculously-written and predictable, but also takes away too much from what Meera does after she wakes up. Meera, with the help of her friend Uma (Miya George) and constable Subramani (MS Bhaskar), realises that the death of her family is no ordinary accident and that they were collateral damage in a staged accident by a mysterious group that carries out such cartel-style executions on a particular stretch of the NH44 near Madurai. Of course, this is shocking only to Meera since Arun chooses to tell us this right in the very first scene of the film; a major misstep in retrospect. Any casual film viewer would have their guesses for how the story might pan out, but that it doesn’t move an inch till after the intermission is surely appalling. You are also asked to overlook.... Read the full review here: https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/the-road-movie-review-this-trisha-starrer-is-a-predictable-dead-end-thriller/article67387601.ece