Chitra Varga

The English actor, Mark Strong opined: “ When you're making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they're never quite sure where they are. ”  Bang on! “ ಮರ್ಮ ” (‘ Marma ’, which translates to ‘ Secret ’) is a 2002 Kannada movie, which takes that sentiment to an extreme. The thriller weaves complex psychological illnesses like schizophrenia, split personality, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), etc., into its narrative. Made on a shoestring budget, it was a hit. Recently betrothed to her fiancé, Anand (Anand), Sudha (Prema) mysteriously goes missing for a few days. She returns home later with some injuries to her head. Seemingly suffering from amnesia, she begins to behave spookily, which puts the family on tenterhooks. Sudha, on top, claims to have witnessed a murder; as proof, she shows a button apparently yanked out of the killer’s jacket. She even begins to act like someone possessed and hallucinates about physical at...

It is often said that we all need fantasy to survive the reality. " ಲೂಸಿಯಾ " (' Lucia'), a 2013 critically-acclaimed Kannada film, deals with a theme that features reality to survive in fanstasy. The psychological thriller was crowd-funded and also remade in Tamil as  Enakkul Oruvan  in 2015. The experimental flick is perhaps a tad too much of a cerebral challenge for mass audiences, who like the action and emotion neat and straight. Keeping pace with the narrative of Lucia is taxing for the average viewer. The film has two parallel plots with non-linear, knitted narratives– one is grounded in reality and the other embedded in a dream. In essence, the theme is similar to that of a zillion movies featuring look-alike replicas or schizophrenic personas, except a virtual, second-life-like realm underpins Lucia. In a sub-plot, a police team is busy busting a drug mafia. The male protagonist, Nikhil, or Nikki (Ninasam Sathish), is an indigent, insomniac usher at a r...