Movie Review: Pisaasu (Tamil)

Director Mysskin's Pisaasu, to put it in a nutshell, is an afterlife story. After all the movie's name itself literally means ghost. But it's also unique and wonderfully affecting. Perhaps one of its kind. The director's previous outings, Yuddham Sei and Onaayum Aattukkuttiyum, were dark, gritty and moody psychological thrillers, and Pisaasu, despite its horror and supernatural roots, is a terrific addition along similar lines. Mind you, this is not your usual haunted house film. There's a house, yes, and there's also a ghost haunting it. But in a refreshing cinematic spin, the movie isn't scary. It's rather... haunting in its exploration of loss, guilt, forgiveness and unrequited love.

Pisaasu essentially is all about Siddharth, the protagonist, trying to get rid of a ghost - Bhavani, a girl who dies en route to hospital after having met with an accident - from his home. Only it turns out that she is benevolent, an angel who's fallen in love with him for his good-naturedness, the very kind of girl Siddharth's mom (very neatly characterised) herself would have found for her son. She covers him with a blanket, doesn't want to see him drink, doesn't like his friends sleeping next to him and occupy her space on their marital bed, saves her mother-in-law's life and takes good care of the home as well as any wife would. She also wants her father (a class act by Radha Ravi) to visit them and let him know that she's living happy and well at her husband's house.

But Siddharth, who had been the one to rush Bhavani to the hospital in the accident's aftermath, is at first beyond scared by the strange happenings. Yet he is unable to shake her off his mind, feeling guilty for not having taken enough pains to save her. Her father likewise is desolate and grief-stricken, unable to come to terms with his only daughter's death. The closure they both desperately seek seems elusive, but Siddharth, who until then was afraid to commit himself to the institution of marriage, willingly sets out to avenge his wife's murderer. A tangential sub-plot about a couple's domestic affairs unfolds as a diversion from the main drama at the start, but develops a likeness that's unlikely to escape notice by the end of it all. Soaked in pathos and a hypnotic violin'esque background score by Arrol Corelli, Pisaasu is poignant and undoubtedly one of the best Tamil films I've seen in a long time.