Director: Vishruth Naik
Cast: Arun Sagar, Shrunga, Anushree, Shwetha
Vishruth Naik’s Ring Master is about three friends who smoke up and have a bad psychedelic trip. But suddenly, the film starts to take itself a little too seriously and gives you a moral science lecture from a textbook full of axioms, some of which are deeply misogynistic, about what the youth of the country should and should not do.
Veda (Shwetha), Rocky (Shrunga) and Madhu (Anushree) live together and decide to bring in the new year by partying in their apartment. Rocky wants some marijuana for the party and chances upon the number of a guy called Bhangiranga (Arun Sagar), who agrees to deliver the drugs to their apartment complex. Bhangiranga then stays for the party too and they all smoke up.
However, after an initial bout of merriment, he reveals his true personality. He traps the trio in the house and tortures them. This, he does not for money but to make them confess their ‘sins’ and even make amends, if possible.
Ring Master reminds one of James Wan and Leigh Wannell’s Saw franchise, except that instead of depicting torture, the film turns into one. We don’t know who Bhangiranga is and why he gets to be this torturer-cum-messiah-cum-psycho but let us take a look at the range of ‘sins’ he gets offended by: drinking too much alcohol or ‘pubbing’, wearing short clothes (a girls only sin), buying too many clothes, (again when the girl does it), bunking college and oh, lastly, killing someone in an accident and not owning up to it (okay, this one we can at least understand but Ranga’s reactions are still incomprehensible).
If Ring Master had stopped at being an over the top cinematic version of a bad trip, it would have still been tolerable but it does not do that. It prophesises and attempts some moral policing too, thrusting the message of ‘Be good or be gone’ in your face, defining what this ‘good’ is simultaneously. For instance, there is a segment where Bhangiranga, the messiah says that wearing little or skimpy clothes is the reason for rape, giving the audience an inkling of the kind of message the film wants to deliver.
As the torturer, Arun Sagar delivers an exaggerated performance that is mostly about singing songs (including some poetry from DVG and G.P. Rajarathnam) and screaming. Anushree, Shwetha and Shrunga perform averagely and one actually feels sorry for them for being cast in this film.
The filmmaker even manages to showcase the drug-induced trip through his camera work but with such a shoddy script and a murderer Bhangiranga as its son of god, the film is difficult to sit through. At its core, the ideology of the film believes in warning the youth from going overboard but who will tell the filmmaker that he went overboard too?
