Adiyae caters to your average youngster whose life revolves around pop-culture references and whose attention span is limited to consuming an Instagram reel. If you are one—and get the many references in this film—you might get good laughs; if you aren’t, it’s not all bad. It’s just bizarre.
Let me try explaining. National Award-winning composer GV Prakash plays Jeeva, a loser, who gets teleported to an alternate dimension, in which he is a National-Award-winning composer Arjun. Jeeva, you see, has to pretend to be Arjun until he finds the key to his reality. All of this happens less than 30 minutes into the film. It might seem convoluted, but director Vignesh and team communicate this ambitious vision without hassle. The team surely owes one to films like Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, Everything Everywhere All At Once and our very own Oh My Kadavule and Irandam Ulagam, for familiarising the audience to the idea of an alternate reality.
Director: Vignesh Karthick
Cast: GV Prakash, Gouri Kishan, Venkat Prabhu, Mirchi Vijay
The biggest strength—and weakness—of a film dealing with the multiverse are the infinite possibilities. The premise warrants randomness, but a creator must also know when to go full throttle and when to press the brake. Director Vignesh Karthick might not always be in control, but he still makes a film that is never short of wacky ideas. It won’t surprise me if people either fall for the randomness or find the film intolerable. I quite enjoyed how the film uses the real-life personas of GV Prakash and Venkat Prabhu to the fullest. The real-life references are very many, including the angle of a high-school sweetheart, which feels like a dramatised retelling of GV Prakash’s own love story.
The film doesn’t concern itself with science and complexity, and this means that it breaks several thumb-rules of the genre. For instance, a character accidentally disrupts a series of events in a particular timeline with everything turning against him. But in his next jump to the future, the same timeline remains undisturbed by his previous interference. And it is a huge turn-off that Jeeva doesn’t tap into an entirely new, futuristic world of possibilities, and restricts his interaction to a handful of people.
At the heart of all the problems in this film is a weak emotional core and how it’s hard to buy the protagonist Jeeva often calling Senthazhini the purpose of his existence. Given that the untimely death of his parents puts him in deep depression, what he seems to need is a support system and therapy—not romance. I wish we were given a stronger reason to root for Jeeva and his love, given that the entire story is centered on this. I also found it quite absurd that Jeeva as the newly transformed Arjun doesn’t take any effort to probe into the objectionable, womaniser persona in the alternate reality or attempt to do some damage-control to his tarnished image. Senthazhini, on the other hand, always resorts to emotionally dumb decisions regardless of the reality she is in.
What works in the film’s favour is Vignesh Karthick’s imagination and the different what-if situations he keeps throwing at us. The film might take its romance too seriously and the emotional inconsistencies don’t help either, but if you, like me, enjoy simple humour, like GV Prakash shouting,”Call me sir! Rolex sir!” then this is a film that you can get quite some entertainment from.
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