Aarathu Sinam

As it happened with Papanasam, a remake of the director's Drishyam, the Tamil remake of his Memories, is also tonally different from the original. That film was as much an emotional drama as it was an investigative thriller — it was about a cop who let his wife and child get killed before his eyes, and how he gets his chance at redemption when he is handed a case involving a 'serial killer'. Director Arivazhan takes this plot, underplays the redemption arc and turns Aarathu Sinam into a murder mystery that also happens to have a tragedy as a sub-plot. This treatment adds pace to the plot but robs the film of the psychological and religious layers, and turn it into a typical thriller.

That said, the film manages to keep us engaged from start to finish. The director is no stranger to an investigative thriller (his debut film, Eeram was one till its interval point), and nicely sets up the mystery. The film opens with assistant commissioner Aravind leading an encounter operation, and then cuts to four years later when we see a kidnapping that turns into a murder. A similar murder happens a few months later and the joint commissioner brings in Aravind, who is now an alcoholic after his wife and child are killed by the gangster who got to live after the encounter that we saw at the star, to help the investigation. The cop soon sees clues that the others don't and surmises that the murders are being committed by an individual who is taking revenge on a gang of women for a sin they had committed by in the past. Can Aravind stop him before he loses another person who is close to him?

Aarathu Sinam is not a frame-by-frame remake unlike many of the recent Malayalam remakes and some of the changes that the director has made to the plot work and make better sense in the context of the milieu where he sets his story. The reason why the gangster involved in the initial shootout gains even more credibility here (even the setting where he takes his revenge seems right here). T...