While watching a thriller, have you ever felt that at its core is a story with enough emotional heft to keep you hooked, but its undoing lies in the way the mystery is unravelled? 118 treads in that zone. K V Guhan takes on multiple roles — cinematography, writing and direction. He weaves a story of a missing girl, the idea of being in a state of ‘lucid dream’, a biomedical scam and narrates it through an investigative journalist.
- Cast: Kalyan Ram, Shalini Pandey and Nivetha Thomas
- Direction: K V Guhan
Good things first. Guhan does away with the frills of songs and forced comic episodes. He also gets his principal actors to be in sync with the film’s ethos and extracts good performances. Kalyan Ram shows marked improvement from what he’s done before and shoulders the proceedings with maturity. Both Nivetha Thomas and Shalini Pandey live up to their credentials of being able performers and shine in the material given to them.
Gautam (Kalyan Ram) is jolted out of sleep with vivid nightmares of a girl being brutally tossed against a painting on the wall. He wakes up trying to make sense of the fragmented images of blood, shattered glass and the girl’s helpless face. It’s 1.18am and his room number is 118. He dismisses it as a bad dream, but it recurs months later in the same room, at the same time.
In the meantime, we learn that the protagonist is an investigative journalist who’s miles ahead of his ilk. It’s amazing how, when he’s helping another vehicle steer out of a water body during an off-road expedition, he notices an ambulance whizzing past on the road nearby and several seconds later, photographs its number plate and asks for a background check. He gets on its trail, and takes on a bunch of goons by himself while simultaneously filming the proceedings. The pitfalls of portraying heroism in a mainstream film! We’ll overlook that. Thankfully, the film gets on track when Gautam gets to the bottom of the dream.
In the meanwhile, his wedding arrangements with Megha (Shalini Pandey) are on and she understands what he’s doing. His search for the missing Aadhya (Nivetha Thomas) turns into an all-consuming exercise. Megha has little to do, but her reactions establish the bond she shares with Gautam and why she feels it’s imperative that he finds the truth. Some more focus on their equation would have helped in showing the depth of the couple’s journey.
The search soon gets a tad boring. After a point it’s easy to predict who will get killed and when. 118 is also talk-heavy and does a lot of explaining. Every move is spelt aloud before being executed.
We see Nivetha Thomas as a photograph and through the fragmented dreams way before we get to her story. When that unfolds, it does shake you up. But when the hero keeps returning to room 118 and keeps harping on cues from which it’s easy to guess the end, there are no surprises. He takes the onus on himself and doesn’t make his trusted friend, the joint commissioner of police, partake in the investigation. He seeks police help only to trace mobile phones or cars!
118 is a case of an earnest team trying its best but faltering.
