At their core, movies are about people talking to each other for most of the runtime (I know it's an oversimplification, but bear with me). Those talks generate drama, suspense, or reveal characters' motives. In Jugnuma: The Fable, the way the characters speak accentuates their privilege and status in society. In Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan used dialogue to immerse us in psychological conflicts. When a film's elements click together seamlessly, we forget that we've spent nearly two hours—whether in a dark theater or on the couch at home—simply listening to people talk. But when the filmmaking is amateurish and weak, we are constantly aware that we are listening to puppets delivering expositions written in the script. This is what I felt while I was watching "Stephen" on Netflix.
Director Mithun Balaji initially planned to make "Stephen" as a 10-minute-long short film. Now, it's a 2-hour feature that doesn't want to be confined to a single movie. I think the first plan was right: "Stephen" should have been 10 minutes long; it isn't quite developed enough as a full-length movie. The strain put into stretching this material is visible. This whydunit spends its entire time explaining the titular character's motives, but undoes itself during the last 15 minutes. Balaji and his co-writer Gomathi Shankar (he is Stephen, the serial killer) echo the sentiments of Mukundan Unni Associates: evil triumphs. But Mukundan was a delicious dark comedy. "Stephen" is unintentionally funny. When a police officer (Michael Thangadurai) applies pressure to his brain to remember a face, he looks like a student pretending to think in front of the invigilator. When two photographs start talking to Stephen, what's supposed to be a creepy, disturbing moment evoked chuckles from this viewer.
A Ferris wheel is the film's idea of "symbolism": when a woman becomes the dominant presence in a household, she is shown rising while her husband descends. You could also say that, like a Ferris wheel, Stephen's life "rotates" endlessly — it has its highs and lows. At one moment, he's playing video games with a friend; the next, he's being beaten by his mother. He might enjoy a few wonderful days, or even months, with a woman, but afterward the relationship begins to spiral downward. A patriarch is seen abusing his wife and child; later, he is reduced to a victim. The wheel is also used "stylistically," as in the shot where it forms the letter "C." These touches sound clever in theory. On the screen, they come across as silly. What's worse is that many scenes look directionless, plain, and static. Take the moment when a boy, terrified of his alcoholic father, tries to hide a puppy. It feels so loose, so… ordinary. Where's the tension? Where's the sense that something is about to explode? For a film that wants to convince us the devil is cunning and slippery, its terror — and the creature meant to embody it — drifts in with the chill of a teddy bear. It doesn't kill; it just tickles lightly.
Final Score- [3/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times