Raja Rangusk

Raja Ranguski begins with a note mentioning that it is a tribute to the late writer Sujatha. And director Dharanidharan gives us a fitting set-up of a whodunit that Sujatha's fictional detectives, Ganesh and Vasanth, would have loved to have a crack at. This is what it involves...

Raja (Metro Shirish, who still needs to work on his expressions), a police constable, falls in love with Ranguski (Chandini Tamilarasan, who continues to get underwritten roles), and gets her to accept his love by posing as a stalker over phone. His ploy succeeds, but he gets the shock of his life when he starts getting calls from a mysterious person mimicking his own voice! The caller threatens to take Ranguski's life, and Raja, who goes to her residential colony to protect her, ends up as the prime suspect in the murder of her neighbour, Maria Paulraj (Anupama), an antique collector. With a hard-nosed cop, KK (Jayakumar) hot on his heels, can Raja clear his name and find out who the killer is?

Despite the hastily written scenes that set up the romance between Raja and Ranguski, Dharanidharan manages to give us a fairly gripping murder mystery in the first half of Raja Ranguski. Yuvan Shankar Raja's score and Yuva's superbly lit visuals lend some atmosphere that adds to the tension. And the director gives us a few credible suspects - from a photographer living in the colony to even Raja himself. Could he the killer - a schizophrenic who has come up with an imaginary caller?

But the problem is that the film eliminates the red herrings almost as soon as they are implied as suspects. And given how the supporting cast isn't developed beyond a handful of characters, we can easily make out that the final revelation will involve one of these characters. But even this wouldn't have been too big a problem with solid plotting. And this is where the film slips. A murder mystery stands out or falls apart by how convincingly it gives us the denouement. And here, both the reveal and the execution of this revelation are underwhelming.