Sadhuram 2 (2016)

Right at the beginning of Sadhuram 2, director Sumanth Radhakrishnan acknowledges his inspiration — James Wan's 2004-film Saw. The film opens with Vishal (Riaz) finding himself chained inside a room. There is another person in the room — Dr Vasudevan (Yog Japee), who is also in the same state. Then, there is also a bloody dead body bang in the middle of the room. And the two are not sure why they have been kidnapped or by whom. The creepiness of this set-up instantly hooks us in and we want to know more on why the kidnapper is playing this elaborate torture game with his victims. Meanwhile, we also get a couple of other sub-plots — one involves a flight that goes missing, another is about Siva, who is being awarded the 'Employee of the Decade' award by his MNC, and the third has a pair of detectives who are trying to track down a psycho killer. The director keeps cutting between these various plots, which enhances the disorienting feeling that we have. But the problem is that the moody visuals of cinematographer Sathish G are hyper-edited (SP Raja Sethupathi is the editor) that we begin to feel nauseous after a point of time (the effect is as similar as watching a badly done 3D film non-stop for three hours). The acting, too, is way exaggerated, and that takes away some of the thrill that Girishh Gopalakrishnan's gripping score provides. But where the film slips is in going the full distance providing us gore, which is what you think first when you think of Saw.