Nelson Venkatesan’s Malayalam film DNA features the interesting Nimisha Sajayan, and that’s reason enough to watch it. She plays a slightly mentally deviant character, the kind of person who gets an ill-deserved reputation as a wacko as she talks too much, or speaks without thinking.
Divya is squeezed into a marriage of compromise with a drunken, disgraced man, Anand (Atharva, giving a performance that grows on you as long as it gets space to grow). It is a case of two misfits making a marriage of convenience work.
I wish the entire film was about Divya and Anand struggling determinedly to find a common ground, diffidently but confidently moving towards one another. Both accomplished actors are in fine form, giving their damaged characters a mendable mould.
But then something happens. The screenplay does a not-so-cool somersault. The couple’s mutual kinship is shattered when their baby is stolen from the hospital after Divya gives birth. It is not just the couple’s life that is shattered. Even the plot, so delicately drawn into a pattern of mutual kinship, becomes a full blown crass effort at crossover filmmaking, changing from a marital love story to a crime thriller with grisly fights, hurling tempo, mind boggling twists and, worst still, an item song performed by a lady who throws her weight around, since she has so much of it to throw.
Watching the shameful shenanigans in the second half, I wondered what happened to the original story, and why are we forced to watch something so crude when we were led to believe that there was a sensitive marital drama tucked away in some corner of exertional plot?
Woefully, while Nimisha Sajayan’s role is reduced to a hand-wringing hyphen in the second half, Atharvaa transforms into a full-fledged action hero with nothing to lose except his muscles. A committed Balaji Sakthivel, as a junior cop on the verge of retirement, joins Atharva in bringing the gang of child lifters to justice.
As a police procedural, DNA is a complete failure. The plotting gets progressively dense, and the earlier sensitivity is submerged in crude commercial considerations. The only time the narrative gets any breathing space after its action makeover takes over is when the couple is left alone.
There is a sequence where Divya, after losing the child they had brought home as a substitute for their biological offspring, wonders if she should advise the child’s real mother on how to look after the child. My heart melted, and not only for the intrinsic emotional heft of the moment, but also for what this film could have been had it not switched lanes.
DNA is a grievously compromised work. It begins well but rapidly spirals into irreversibly idiocy, leaving us wondering what prompts filmmakers to damage what they begin gently but gradually steer into mob approbation
