National award winning director
Neelakanta always tries to walk against the grain and his quest for uncommon
storylines is never ending. If one could draw a pattern from his previous
films, he plants a disorder in his protagonists, and this has become his
obsession. However, in Maaya he is confused, in turn confusing audience,
whether the trace of visions that surmount the lead character is actually a
disorder or a gift.
The director picks a novel
concept of ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) – when I say novel, it’s only for
Telugu cinema because this thing has been explored in Hindi and Malayalam, and
needless to say about Hollywood. He doesn’t stop there and adds a dash of
emotional drama and elements of crime to the main plot and force-fits it in the
Tollywood storytelling template.
The movie begins with a quote of
Sadhguru. Meghana (Avantika Mishra) is a victim of a tainted past where she
loses her mother by not paying heed to her superpower. She is a television
reporter and falls head over heels for a fashion designer Siddharth Varma
(Harshavardhan Rane), who is in town for research work on his upcoming fashion
show. Her ability to foresee deaths comes to the fore again and this time she
manages to save the probable victims. While she is on her way to propose love,
she bumps into her childhood friend Pooja (Sushma Raj) who discloses about her
relationship with Siddharth and their marriage which is on cards. A lovelorn
Meghana checks all the buttons on melodrama and also gets to see the grey
shades of Siddharth in one of her visions. Then the film leans to the side of a
crime thriller.
Maaya suffers badly
because of a wrong casting call. Avantika is not made for this genre. She is
callous to most of the fearsome moments and her dubbed voice sounds more than
her age. You can’t emote to her condition as it’s not visible through her
expressions. Just a tear drop wouldn’t do. For Harshavardhan, this is arguably
the toughest role to pull off, which he does justice to an extent. The
supporting cast is a big letdown as neither Nagababu nor Jhansi could
understand the gravity of the situation and end up offering lame advices.
However, Sushma holds the pieces of the later half together and offers lot of
promise.
The first half looks like a soap
opera with television like framings. The visions of the heroine pave way to
some predictable stuff. The audience expects a Paycheck like spin-off
and lot of spine-chilling moments, but not even one satiates their wants. The core
concept fizzles out in the second half and the slipshod storytelling adds more
nails to the coffin. The only saving grace is the background score of Sekhar
Chandra.
Maaya fails to cast a
spell on the audience. It’s a thriller sans thrill elements. The half-baked
psychological thriller devolves into a murder mystery, and the latter outshines
the concept of ESP that was marketed as the USP of the film. If you are a smart
alec you can foresee the big climactic twist and even that earth-shattering one
is a rip-off from a popular Hindi film from the 90s. Now, that’s the audience getting
a sense of ESP!
My Rating: Expectation - 8/10; Reality - 4/10
This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.
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