Trauma Movie Review: Vivek Prasanna’s Film Suffers From Puerile Execution, But Underlines An Important Problem
The crime thriller stars Vivek Prasanna, Poornima Ravi, Chandini Tamilarasan, Prathosh in the lead roles.
Trauma U/A
Sexual crimes have become the go-to place for filmmakers to find easy conflicts. It has become a license for all the on-screen violence of the protagonist and the viewer is expected to get a cathartic release seeing such revenge stories. In the end, the victim or the sexual violence itself is just reduced to nothing more than a conflict or a reason for the story. Trauma is yet another addition to the list of such Tamil films, which are on the rise now. However, director Thambithurai Mariyappan should be lauded as he at least doesn’t capture such violence with an exploitative gaze, which has become the norm. Such maturity is shockingly absent in other aspects of Trauma, which comes across as the work of a novice short-filmmaker.
As far as the story goes, Trauma follows three narratives because it wants to be a hyperlink film, which is in vogue now (thanks to Lokesh Kanagaraj). We have two petty thieves who go about stealing cars. They are straight out of Tamil black-and-white comedy dramas because they seem to not even know how much a second-hand car would sell for. They wonder whether an SUV would sell for twenty thousand rupees, and that’s supposed to be funny.
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We then follow a couple–Geetha (Chandini) and Sundar (Vivek Prasanna)–struggling to become parents. Sundar doesn’t tell Geetha that he is infertile and ends up seeking help from an infertility centre to fix him. The doctor gives him a medicine to be taken by both of them for a month. Sundar starts giving it to Geetha without her knowledge. Turns out, the medicine is a sedative and the doctor is part of a network of criminals who rape such patients when they are unconscious and record the crime to blackmail people for money.
There’s a romantic love story in Trauma, which seems to have no relevance to the main storyline and seems like an excuse to fill time. Shockingly, the conflict of the film arrives after we are thirty minutes into it, while the entire runtime is less than two hours. The film just wallows in cliched writing, and most of the scenes are like they were taken straight out of Tamil TV serials that are broadcast in the afternoon, which are not watched even by the undemanding target audience. Now, Trauma doesn’t look bad as the makers have spent enough on the camera work and the production design of the film. The red, tangerine, and dark hues which have become the default colour palette of such crime thrillers (again, thanks to Lokesh Kanagaraj) are seen in Trauma too. With regard to the cinematography and framing, cinematographer Ajith Srinivasan has done a commendable job, which looks conspicuous as everything else about the film is underwhelming.
It is tempting to praise Trauma as it projects itself as a film with a noble cause — advocating child adoption. However, that seems to be just a means to an end. At least, the end should have been an entertaining watch like Maharaja, which also used sexual violence as its main plot point. Trauma takes an easy route every single time, which is laughable at times like how the police end up finding the hideout of the gang. It is easy to say that Trauma is living up to its name, which would even make for a good headline for the review. But that would be like reducing the impact of the word and an easy way out, a mistake the film made at every possible instance.
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