The director doesn’t trust his material. He doesn’t trust the audience enough to feel that this “issue” is enough, and doesn’t need to be cheaply sensationalised.
Spoilers ahead…
J J Fredrick’s Ponmagal Vandhal opens beautifully. We are in a forest in Lovedale — a misty picture that could be on a tourist brochure. And then, gunshots! The who and why are revealed through a series of news reports and accounts by cops, intercut with wailing mothers as the bodies of little girls are dug out from the earth. The credits appear in gentle dissolves, without disturbing the mood. It’s a solid, no-nonsense stretch that establishes the premise and drops a hint that this may not be your typical Jyotika vehicle. Watching these scenes at home, I was happy there were no cheers when the title card for the producer appeared (it’s Suriya) and when the heroine is introduced, riding a motorbike. Immersion and atmosphere are everything in crime thrillers/ courtroom dramas and nothing kills one more than an ear-piercing wolf-whistle, or the blinding flash from a smartphone screen two seats away.
Read the rest of this article here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/reviews/tamil-review/ponmagal-vandhal-on-amazon-prime-review-this-courtroom-drama-starring-jyotika-needed-to-be-much-darker-but-its-content-to-remain-family-friendly-baradwaj-rangan-jj-fredrick/
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Harish S
May 29, 2020
Among the many issues the film had, I am surprised someone who had been studying for 15 years on a particular case could have done such amateur homework. The final battle is also something I couldn’t digest. When you get your last chance thanks to fate, how can you come to court without any iota of strategy? The Epiphany of ‘respect is the key’ to corner Thyagarajan looks good as an idea. But it needed good writing and more than ‘sodakku’ acting to pull it off.
Besides, did everyone except me understood the climax? Thyagarajan doesn’t explicitly admit his crime right? I only heard Jothika narrating the whole incident as theory.
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brangan
May 29, 2020
Harish S: Adhellaam vidunga! The million daalar koschin is…
How did Parthiban know what he revealed to Jyotika at the end?
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Satya
May 29, 2020
“Watching these scenes at home, I was happy there were no cheers when the title card for the producer appeared (it’s Suriya) and when the heroine is introduced, riding a motorbike. Immersion and atmosphere are everything in crime thrillers/ courtroom dramas and nothing kills one more than an ear-piercing wolf-whistle, or the blinding flash from a smartphone screen two seats away.”
Times aren’t kind enough. While I had very low interest in watching it ‘today’, the Instagram and Whatsapp stories are full of them, numerous posts in social media spoiling the film and textual elevations (if that is actually a feeling to describe) ruining further.
Nuisance and Nonsense are divine, because they permeate everywhere. Lockdown can’t restrict that!
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abishekspeare
May 29, 2020
I think the main problem with OTT platforms is they keep trowing different things at you. It’s like an impulsive person who makes a 100 different decisions every day and implements each one of them unsuccessfully .
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brangan
May 29, 2020
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Manikantan
May 29, 2020
The respect is the key part in the court scene with thiagarajan looked like a cartoon version of the Few Good men court scene with Jack Nicholson
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Varsha
May 30, 2020
Rajarathinam(Parthiban) knows the final reveal because of the discrepancy between Venba’s version of the events as she narrates it in the court and what Parthiban heard from the police officer earlier. While describing the discovery of the girls’ bodies, the policeman tells him that they found one girl buried in the front of the building and four other bodies at the back of the building and a dead dog inside the building. He never says anything about a dead girl INSIDE the building. But Venba says she told her mother about another girl called Angel, whom she rushed to save, but found already dead. We are only shown Angel lying dead in a bed in the scene accompanying the narration. The narration itself does not explicitly state it, but then no one goes to save someone who is either already buried or decomposing. So Angel gives herself away to the shrewd and experienced lawyer.
Actually, with the above said information alone, Rajarathinam could only have guessed(a well-educated guess, nevertheless!) at this point that the narrator in front of him is Angel. All he can know for sure is that she is not Venba. There is another tidbit of information from a prior scene that we are shown again to make us see the connect, to convince us that she is indeed Angel. That scene has Rajarathinam playing shuttle and his assistant tells him the girl child’s body that was recovered from the old building was Angel, an orphan. She is also the only orphan among the dead children. The other dead girls must have been identified and claimed by their parents. Also, at the beginning, we are shown only four bodies being recovered from Jothi’s backyard. The investigation officer says the fifth child, the one in the video footage, was mutilated in the house beyond recognition. Since Jothi is innocent, the police must have mutilated the body and made everyone believe that it is that of Angel. Rajarathinam, of course, must know all this.
So, to sum up, we have a lawyer who knows his opponent is clearly lying as to her identity and he comes to know of it from events she mentions, that could have never happened, featuring a girl, who is supposed to be a total stranger to her and whose body has not been positively identified, in a heart-wrenching story of child abuse. And Rajarathinam comes to the only logical conclusion possible and reveals the same to Angel in Parthiban’s style.
Harish S: I felt the climax to be very unconvincing, but to answer your query, Pethuraj arranges a last-minute witness, as a substitute to Suresh Pandian, who Venba threatens Varadarajan with. She also uses Varadarajan’s penchant for being respected, and uses it against him to anger him enough to make him confess that he did indeed go to the tea factory. After Venba’s narration, Varadarajan remains silent and so does his lawyer. I think the point is that the presence of a witness to Alexander’s handing-over Jothi to Varadarajan made any opposition totally pointless. It is almost as if the director had had enough of the script and just wanted to finish it off asap.
One other thing I would like to mention here is regarding the big reveal in the interval block. For me, the interval block reveal was, strangely enough in hindsight, not spoiled by the flashback. But the conversation between Pethuraj and Venba just before the flashback, combined with the interval block reveal, spoiled, to some extent, the final reveal about the protagonist’s identity. I could never imagine Pethuraj telling Jothi’s daughter that she needs to be Jothi to understand her pain. Also, there is the way he said it. It is a private conversation. Will someone in Pethuraj’s position say “Jothi’s diary”, “Jothi’s pain” to someone who he knows to be Jothi’s own daughter, that too, in an emotional moment involving Jothi? I kept waiting for some character to say she is not Jothi’s daughter, and the final reveal was such a satisfaction in an otherwise more or less disappointing melodrama disguised as a court drama.
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abishekspeare
May 30, 2020
BR can we please have more AskBRs and insta lives?
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neabs
May 30, 2020
I kind of got very disappointed with the movie. The premise is sensitive but it lacked the sensibility it should have been dealt with.
I still remember how child abuse played a significant role in Highway.
The too much of ranting in the second half from Jyothika kind of spoiled everything. More than loosely written characters, the plot was packed with multiple angles like political power, Honor killing which made the whole story look so blank.
Spoilers ahead
And half the way the story went in a predictable way there was a guess with 15 years gap and venba entering who venba was and who Rohit was.
Nevertheless I really liked Parthiban word play.
I really had few questions in my mind. Why the police did not find out Pethuraj connection with Jyothi and why nobody could find his connection with the case??
Why Parthiban kept revelation to the end ?
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tonks
May 30, 2020
Why did they show the mother in the flashback as Jyothika at first, and then change her into another actress ? Another cheap red herring?
Dumb, dumb movie, an insult to the audience’s intelligence that is clichéd with very cheap melodrama. The only bright spot was that it was on Prime, so I could breezily skim and fast forward through many bits so that at least those minutes of my life were not wasted.
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Naren
May 30, 2020
Well, looks like everything has been covere here already so nothing new to say except expanding on what @Manikantan said . . . While a caricature, it doesn’t just look like it but the whole undoing of the Varadharajan character is right out of the pages of A Few Good Men. Him being Nathan Jessup with his hubris and premature exit from the court room and Venba being Daniel Kaffee, calling him back saying that she hasn’t dismissed him yet . . . but I was already maxed out cringing from all the melodrama, overacting, overreactions, plot craters etc.
This movie wud have blended well with other similar melodramatic tropes like “Vidhi” or “Archana I.A.S.” during those respective times. Now it’s simply anachronistic. Most of the casting alone is a good example of that.
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brangan
May 30, 2020
I am trying to decide which my favourite red herring is? Making us believe Angel looks like Venba’s mother? The sinister bribery of Pratap Pothen? Or is it the fact that we are told this is a courtroom drama when it’s actually a melodrama?
Ooh, the choices…
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ravenus1
May 30, 2020
BR, even with the flaws pointed out, I think you must have been feeling really kind-hearted while reviewing this. The script feels like it was written on a drunk weekend and the direction is utterly lacking in consistency, randomly veering between trying to be stylish (the scene where Parthiban mentally revisits the crime scene) and adhering to the 80’s masala formula (courtroom harangues as creaky as Bhagyaraj’s wig). I’d say Pink was a film with good ideas that would have been a more hard-hitting experience if it didn’t put in a big star (AB) giving message dumps and taking the focus away from the vulnerable women. This one on the other hand was from start (okay, the lake shot was good) to finish a massive load of rubbish.
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krishramavajula
May 31, 2020
And what is with Parthiban’s character? What explains his sudden change of heart? Or what his view on the case in the first place? Just because the character was played by Parthiban, are we supposed to believe that he is a good man at heart and it is obvious?
(Just kidding) I think Parthiban’s character was insulted by Rajarathinam in the climax scene when he says ‘Rajarathinam Sir naan paathukuren’ and that is why he decided not to rebuke any of Jyothika’s final points in the court.
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Faroo
May 31, 2020
For some movies you need popcorn. For others, like this one, you need a blade – periodically slashing at yourself and saying “naa yaen paarkiren?”.
Painful dialogue, a string of older actors past their sell-by dates, a profusion of “sir” in the courtroom, marana-kadi speechifying instead of evidence, 10-year old girl that after 15 years looks 45, a mid-movie reveal that anyone with half a brain would have guessed (especially since the mother was named Jothi), a mind-numbing ending with an unnecessary twist thrown in — exhausting and extremely disappointing.
BR — i think you were very generous in your review. I just got off watching Paatal Lok and the differences (allowing for that being a series and this a movie) is so stark. Even Zee’s Bumfaad was so much more better than this. If this is the future of Tamil OTT releases we are doomed.
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H. Prasanna
June 1, 2020
@BR how do you feel about being able to get back to the movie, or pausing, to check notes when writing a review? Having expressed the pressures of the same-day review and being first to review, is this an advantage you could get used to?
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brangan
June 2, 2020
I watch the film exactly like in a theatre. First half. a short break. Second half.
You have to respect the flow the director intended.
If I don’t have to review a movie or I am rewatching an older film, then I might pause here and there, but still I try to sit through the whole thing at one go.
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H. Prasanna
June 2, 2020
@BR integrity appreciated!
In this instance, I watched the movie after reading the review and the comments here (I am not much of a plot person; sometimes I read the whole script before watching a movie). I was looking out for whether they show, at least some visual cue, how the Partheipan character comes to know that Jo is Angel. There was none the first time; so I went back; nothing again. But it was good to go back for something we might have missed the first time; not a luxury you can afford with theater release. Unless you want to watch the whole thing again for some retrospective mystery effect like The Sixth Sense.
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brangan
June 2, 2020
Actually, Prasanna, “integrity” may be too big and noble a word in this context. I see as something to do with the truthfulness of the review.
I am watching the film with full concentration, right? If I have to go back to a scene etc, it means the director did not do a good enough job of making me understand that point during the first viewing of the scene.
So if I rewatch that scene and write a review, then it’s kind of… wrong. Do you get it? Because that’s something I would not have been able to do in the theatre.
So the review written after rewatching the scene will not be the review I would have written from a theatre viewing.
I am not talking about the nuances and micro-details that you see and appreciate during repeat viewings. I am talking about basic stuff — plot, characters, etc. These have to “make sense” as per the flow of the film, without pausing etc.
I hope I explained this properly 😀
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Rahini David
June 2, 2020
Sorry to interrupt BR. But that IS integrity. I think I would have personally just pushed a “I had to go back and check” line into the review and seen it the way I want.
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H. Prasanna
June 2, 2020
You basically follow the context rules of the one-time viewing experience meant for the audiences, by the director. This ensures you are in the same context setting as both parties involved. It simply makes most sense to most people who are reading the review; hence, it is not because of integrity.
When you are exploring subtexts and themes in the second or third viewing you could take the liberties of pausing and rewatching some parts.
Hope I got it now!? Or, this is as much I will be able to get 👍
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Arangan Rishikesh T
June 12, 2020
https://aranganrishikesh.blogspot.com/2020/06/ponmagal-vandhal-movie-review.html
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