There is a twist at the end of this uneven but powerful film, which sort of wipes away all its sins of excess. It features the very lovely Sara Arjun, fresh from her Dhurandhar triumph. Sara plays a rape survivor whose supportive parents help her get justice. So far so good. Euphoria appears to be a darker shade of Pink with many commercial elements. And nothing wrong in that.
It is loud and dramatic, with deeply punctuated chapters which want to scream out a message to all parents of privileged children: your over-indulgence could ruin their lives.
The insistent italicized dramatic tone serves the screenplay’s purpose. There is no room for understatement and subtlety here. Rape is not a subtle crime. Writer Gunasekhar and his writers construct a credible case against date rape.
They then decide to make another film. The post-midsection half with a narcotics cop, Jayadev (Gautham Menon), blowing hot and cold, feels like a different film. Lately, Menon has been doing a lot of acting. I don’t know if that is a good thing. He certainly seems to be enjoying himself.
Almost like the privileged brat Vikas (Vignesh Gavireddy), the storytelling goes astray, leading to several roadblocks in the second half, until we reach the decisive and moving closure.
For all its excesses, Euphoria ticks the right boxes. It has a conscience and is not afraid to flaunt it. It is uneven in execution, but it succeeds in getting to its right destination in spite of the U-turns.
A major hurdle is some of the actors who are clearly doing their job, and nothing more. Bhoomika Chawla, in a key role as a repentant mother, brims over with empathy but lacks the range to make the mother-son confrontations look poignant. Her character Vindhya required an actress with the range of Sharada or Shabana Azmi, although admittedly this is not the place for hefty histrionics.
What really worked for me were the initial warm-ups in the plot when Sara Arjun’s character, Chaitra, moves through her unbearable pain to a place of self-awareness. I wish the director had continued with Chaitra’s journey into healing and not inflicted new wounds on the plot.
Nonetheless, Euphoria is laudable for steering the audience into an area of darkness without losing sight of the light.
