Okay Kona Venkat, the audience has made note of your emphasis that you have written the dialogues of Tripura and also Geetanjali and your attempt to assuage the feelings of your director by taking his name too in the middle of the film! Director Raaja Kiran’s second outing after Geetanjali is Tripura. There is no moving away from the horror genre and Shakalaka Shankar and Saptagiri provide the laughs this time too but leave a huge hint that another similar act, the audience will reject them. In Tripura, the opening scene shows a young woman being killed and buried, covered by bricks and plastered squeaky clean in a wall of a farm house of the man she loved after being raped. Who is she, why and how she got killed has to be unravelled but the director takes the simple point and crams it into the small irregular hole that is the script, just as the rapists make her disappear. Now the other side of the story belongs to the heroine, the legally wed wife of the hero who move in to the farm house for a temporary period. This is where the conflict point arises. The wife has an unexplained ability to foresee people’s death..we mean her dreams come true and sensing fear, insecurity lurking around the hero behaves crazily leading his wife to suspect him of having killed his girl friend.
It ai’nt cool if the hero is the murderer so the director does the inevitable ..for most part of the film he leads the people to believe that the hubby is the culprit or perhaps his senior doctor (Rao Ramesh) and suddenly at the fag end of the story creates another plot to test the intelligence of the viewer. As the film progresses, the auteur realises the heroine has a supernatural ability to dream and predict deaths is fizzing out, he creates another sub plot of a plumber to justify it is just a coincidence but bounces right back as the ghost’s quench for revenge rises. What one doesn’t understand is why the cop returns to make matters worse for himself. There are too many things, too much to take in ..the film. Lust, horror, a seemingly silly brother-sister relationship, innocent wife from a village who shows off pictures on the tab while a motley group of women seek thrill in teasing the newly wed..in the presence of her father.
The screenplay at this point gets a bit complicated especially after the exit after the comedians who are ousted by the ghost. Even if the husband turns out to be a killer, the point despite being predictable would have been light on the head. The most unthinkable part is the explanation given by Rao Ramesh in the last scene that the woman who died and the heroine were friends. Help! It can’t get worse than this. Also a plumber visiting a deserted house when the husband is out on work is done to death in Ravi Babu’s and other films. The man who played the cop, the newcomer lacks mojo, the spark and the body. Swati tries to strike a balance between innocence and maturity but somewhere the gap is glaring. The songs are mere fillers and the lead pair are not just capable of dancing. Despite putting on weight Swati lacks the oomph to be a typical glam doll, it is surprising that Pooja Ramachandran who on the other hand is married looks young and in shape. On the whole, the cast chip in decent performances, it is the director who needs to reign in. A part of the film is a direct lift from a Tamil film, instead of engaging the audience with an entertaining story, the director focuses more on proving that the audience’s guesses are wrong and above all he tries to give a justification to loose ends when the film is over and the crowd is on the way out. The title turns out to be apt only in the last scene when the heroine is possessed by the ghost to take revenge on her rapist.
