Mercury Review: Ghost movie with no spirit

anything, Mercury will make you realise how good Nila Madhab Panda's Kadvi Hawa was.

Although man's greed and the destruction he spreads is the theme that binds the two films, Mercury reduces it to sentimental diddling and a mishmash of literalisms and forced symbolisms.

Without anything like the intensity of Kadvi Hawa or its lyric passages, Karthik Subbaraj stages Mercury as a thriller about five spiritual offenders and closes the film with a grand exercise in aesthetic purification.

Those who dig the harmless kicks that thrillers provide may end up in a huff; might complain that under the pretext of a genre movie, they were treated to a show of self-conscious miming. And those with a tolerance for ‘messages’ may read Mercury as a parody of the standard socially conscious movie.

Subbaraj clearly cannot have it both ways: he's planning a candlelight vigil inside a toxic factory. Not recommended, sahib!

The overarching concern of Mercury is Corporate Greed, but the marketing of the movie throws the game. For this is not a Silent Thriller as the Press-Kit claims: there's music here that alerts you to whatever precise emotion you must feel at any given moment and there are sound effects.

Moreover, for a movie that so defiantly claims to be ‘Silent', there’s hardly anything diegetic to be heard.

Violin notes signify static time.

The mouth organ pipes in despair.

Industrial sounds accompany the red-sweatered, blue-eyed, lungi-clad zombie figure played by Prabhu Deva.

And completing the band is a ghost-sensing deer who in a moment of transcendence... burps!

A dialogue-less movie is what it actually is, but mechanically engineered.

If anything, Mercury will make you realise how good Nila Madhab Panda's Kadvi Hawa was.

Although man's greed and the destruction he spreads is the theme that binds the two films, Mercury reduces it to sentimental diddling and a mishmash of literalisms and forced symbolisms.

Without anything like the intensity of Kadvi Hawa or its lyric passages, Karthik Subbaraj stages Mercury as a thriller about five spiritual offenders and closes the film with a grand exercise in aesthetic purification.

Those who dig the harmless kicks that thrillers provide may end up in a huff; might complain that under the pretext of a genre movie, they were treated to a show of self-conscious miming. And those with a tolerance for ‘messages’ may read Mercury as a parody of the standard socially conscious movie.

Subbaraj clearly cannot have it both ways: he's planning a candlelight vigil inside a toxic factory. Not recommended, sahib!

The overarching concern of Mercury is Corporate Greed, but the marketing of the movie throws the game. For this is not a Silent Thriller as the Press-Kit claims: there's music here that alerts you to whatever precise emotion you must feel at any given moment and there are sound effects.

Moreover, for a movie that so defiantly claims to be ‘Silent', there’s hardly anything diegetic to be heard.

Violin notes signify static time.

The mouth organ pipes in despair.

Industrial sounds accompany the red-sweatered, blue-eyed, lungi-clad zombie figure played by Prabhu Deva.

And completing the band is a ghost-sensing deer who in a moment of transcendence... burps!

A dialogue-less movie is what it actually is, but mechanically engineered.

There's nothing that feels sourced from life; not the acoustics, not the visuals. There are hardly any shots that offer you a real sense of place, but if you want plays with shadows, sure, Karthik Subbaraj will arrange it for you.

He's a trickster, this Subbaraj, a Yuppie who wants to tell us how shallow Yuppiedom is.

He has the schoolboy gush of someone who wants to create something avant-garde, but cannot think beyond a story framework that's now open range for a thousand slasher films: A group of the Young and the Careless who accidentally kill someone,and who, in their turn, are killed, one after the other, mercilessly. (We all know what they did in 1997, Subbaraj Sir).