Questions flickered in my mind 10 minutes into White Rose. How can one human being endure such unmitigated cruelty? Divya (Kayal Anandhi) has already been rejected by her parents for marrying a Muslim. But moments after she and her war veteran husband celebrate her birthday with their four-year-old daughter, she loses the husband to a horrific accident. Moments later, their house is broken into and the daughter kidnapped by a loan shark to whom Divya owes money. The least of her ordeals begin here – they are only the prologue. With a moody score and jump scares breaking out unexpectedly, the film entertains first and then grows tiring as debilitating misfortune piles on. At one point there are several holes in the plot a meteor could fly through.
Director: K Rajashekar
Cast: Kayal Anandhi, RK Suresh, Rooso Sridharan, Vijjith, Baby Nakshathra, Sasilaya, Dharani Reddy
Deeply in debt and desperate for money to rescue her daughter from a kidnapper who had financed their lives, Divya finds herself in the sex racket. In her first try, Divya is caught by a killer who is preying on girls. Will she manage to keep the killer at bay to save her daughter’s life? What is behind the killer’s rampage?
At the beginning, when the world-building for the film is made slow as the conflict begins to get going, it’s exciting. A few red herring jump scares and scenes, a few motifs made with ominous music so your heart beats faster before the hero even gets to danger. So you sit through the film up until the end of Act I, even with a few snags with writing in the screenplay. Some body swapping has been done in the manner in which the narrative is told, which lends to the confusion for a bit, but you’re fine getting over such inconveniences for the thrill factor. For now.
At the centre of White Rose is an unspeakable crime routinely concealed under the guise of a mental aberration, and often granted amnesty under the law, even in the case of adults, when caretakers become predators. Few know of the disorder that is primarily sexual in nature. Recently, however, Vaibhav fully explored this grave issue in a delightful and simple way in his film Ranam. There too, the problem is handled masterfully. But it is what happens before and after it that derails the purpose of the message, as does the graphic nature of the violence and its central subject. How White Rose escaped censorship formalities under a U/A certificate is also scary.
The serial killer with a psychological disorder, played by RK Suresh, is the antagonist here. At one point in the film, someone asks him how many women he’s killed. Silence. (The nearest he comes to speaking in the film is with an unquoted printout that looks like this: ‘Haha haha .) Since his role gives him no lines in the film — literally none — even though he appears in nearly every scene of White Rose, one is forced to suspect that the writers didn’t quite know what to do with him. (We should fear him, but we don’t know why.) If the makers had spent more time with his character, instead of the ‘how-Divya-finally-breaks-free-and-survives’ segment, they might have had a story with some real meat to it.
But for most of its running length, Black Rose maintains a steady pace, as suspense is built up and then slowly released, until the major reveal that occurs around the 90-minute mark. Its problem comes chiefly in its last, torture-filled 30 minutes. The sole focus on Divya’s escape attempts becomes tiresome; despite the escalation in danger, her being attacked by the villain occasionally verges on the absurd. Sometimes, even basic survival instincts seem to be missing: beaten by the villain in a scene at her home, she doesn’t bother to pick at least a lamp or a centrepiece from the table that’s right next to her to thwart her assailant. This mundanity breaks the tension that Black Rose strives to build so cleverly.
Anandhi excels at delivering, giving the film its only fluoroscope and constantly shifting between a worried mother and a terrified young woman. She’s the only reason to have stuck through this two-and-a-half hour film, one that starts off well then sinks into needless repetitions. The story’s moral that every mother must ultimately conform to society’s mandatory ideal of a monogamously wedded housewife was pretty predictable (‘Aandavan Nallavangala Sodhipaan aana Kai vida maatan,’ anyone?), and its narrative, taking its time to navigate through a pinball machine, winding up in a swanky décor of a pub and eventually returning well-worn, was unnecessarily convoluted. After the credits rolled, my only thought was: ‘But what does White Rose mean?’ For the life of me, I could not yet find the title and the story coming together; the title’s lingering distance from the film’s theme felt as far away from my emotional heart as anything else by the end.
