'Mercury' review: Silence is loud enough

The film has its fair share of chills and thrills

April 13, 2018 04:57 pm | Updated April 16, 2018 04:50 pm IST

A still from ‘Mercury’

A still from ‘Mercury’

Those who have seen Karthik Subbaraj’s Pizza and Jigarthanda will surely want to check out his third outing Mercury . Five friends from a deaf and dumb school are shown chilling at a desolate house in a hill station with loud music. Mercury has a trope which oft-repeated in horror films — a group of people (here, friends who unwittingly get involved in a hit and run incident) who are killed one after another, either by a ghost or some killer. Here, towards the end of the story, there is another sub plot which helps tie the threads together. Is it right to call Mercury a dubbed movie when there is no language involved at all?

This is a silent film where no one talks, the silence is however filled by background music i.e. the noise that gels with the surroundings but it is sometimes loud. So, the five friends go for a midnight drive in a car and accidentally kill a man (Prabhu Deva) in the dark. They try to dispose the corpse but it reappears alive in a chemical factory named the Corporate Earth, where the five friends find themselves trapped.

What happens there is intriguing but you are prepared for a predictable ending or a slight twist in the story. The fabulous production design adds to the chills and the entire atmosphere helps in visualising the factory where mercury was made and its leakage maimed or killed scores of people a decade ago.

Prabhu Deva makes you cringe and cower in some moments and one waits to see who he is and why is he behaving weirdly, but with his face greased most of the time, he puts his ears to maximum use and manages to convey his feelings.

Nothing much can be said of the acting by the rest of the cast, all they did was carry a one-dimensional expression. Karthik should have spent more time on training the actors in sign language.

The crisp screen time works but the message at the end about the Bhopal gas tragedy was unnecessary; when the silence works so loud, where is the need for words? Also the sudden change of heart — from hate and fear to an attempt to create sympathy — for the killer doesn’t hit the right chord and the tempo nosedives.

This is not the best of Karthik Subbaraj’s films but the story doesn’t completely disappoint either.

Mercury

Cast : Prabhu Deva, Anish, Deepak

Director : Karthik Subbaraj

Plot : A victim of mercury poisoning takes revenge before showing his soft side

Genre : Horror

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