Debutant director Mithun’s Stephen, now streaming on Netflix, comes dangerously close to being an exploitative perspective on domestic abuse. It is shot mostly in rooms filled with breathy, psychotic people pushing each other around, enjoying the weak being heckled until they collapse emotionally and physically.
This is also the first film where domestic abuse is turned on the head. A woman thrashing her husband with a stick becomes, unintentionally, an occasion for hilarity rather than horror.
Stephen is top-heavy, tawdry, pompous, and pointless. Why do we need to get into a serial killer’s head? Does the world become a safer place if we know one psychopath has been locked away after more than two hours of the psycho misleading us into believing he is not as guilty as he seems?
How do degrees of guilt have any validity when we are dealing with a mass murderer? Is he to be empathized with if he has killed only 8 out of the 9 victims, or whatever?
And who the hell cares how Stephen, played with unnerving vileness by Gomathi Shankar, thinks and feels? This is a disturbed mind, his antisocial behaviour fuelled and formatted by an abusive childhood: who is doing the abusing, that’s the question.
Director Mithun fills up the cramped emotional and physical spaces with exacerbated violence. If the director, discernibly impressed by his own comfort in the dark zone, wants the audience to feel suffocated by the grisly goings-on, then he has the last laugh.
The camera leans morbidly into the murky, creating a power play between the psychologically stressed and the rest. Often it is hard to tell which side the screenplay is really on.
The investigators, a cop Michael (Michael Thungadurai) and a psychologist Seema (Smruthi Venkat), seem unequal to the task: not difficult to seem so when your adversary is treated with kid gloves by the screenwriters.
The endgame where Stephen falls in love with a girl called Krithika displays a modicum of restraint and logic, found to be missing in the rest of this film, which leans heavily into the anatomy of evil and topples over into the abyss.Stephen , Inside The Murky Mind Of A Serial Killer
Also Read: Perfect Family review: A near perfect look at an imperfect family’s struggles
