Kalyan Ram’s 118 Review: Flawed Yet Thrilling

Kalyan Ram’s latest movie ‘118’ released today with a decent opening at the Box office. The Twitter review was overwhelming where the Twitterati and film critics hailed the film positively. The slickly made trailer and teaser received a good response from the public, which also helped in attracting audiences to theatres.

The film is a paranormal thriller directed by KV Guhan who also makes his directorial debut in Telugu.

A Telugu film under this kind of genre is a tough task to direct, but KV Guhan did a fairly good job and Kalyan Ram, this time, was the sole hero in all aspects.

Now getting into the story, Gautam ( Kalyan Ram) is an investigative journalist who is disturbed by a repetitive dream he has about a woman being hit and a car being thrown off a cliff into a lake. He starts getting curious and starts his investigation about who the woman is and in the process gets to know of some shocking facts about the girl and the incident. How he solves the mystery is what follows is the rest of the story.

Kalyan Ram excelled in the role of a journalist and gave an understated but powerful performance as a reporter haunted by these dreams. He has also proved his mettle in the action scenes which were quite stylishly taken and thankfully, the usual dance and song routine are not there except for an unnecessary romantic song with Shalini Pandey. This seems to have been placed to appease the B center crowds and for the usual visual relief.

Coming to Shalini Pandey, there was not much of her role but whatever it was, she did a good job. The highlight of the movie was Nivetha Thomas, whose role is brief and yet crucial to the movie and she leaves quite the mark.

The other cast including Prabhas Srinu, Nasser, Hariteja and others acted well in their limited roles.

KV Guhan who is basically a cinematographer in both Tamil and Telugu films directed a film in 2010 and this is his second film and his first in Telugu.

The movie has all the elements of a suspense thriller and the script quite tight, which makes the movie quite engaging. The second half turns out to be slow and by the time we reach the pre-climax the film loses track and falls short of logic. Some scenes are not quite convincing but in the aspects of cinematography, the film gets full marks for obvious reasons.

The taking is stylish, music, background score by Sekhar Chandra is good. He managed to elevate the scenes with a good score.

Overall, the movie is definitely an above average film and joins the list of must -watch films in the suspense thriller categories.

Plus Points

Kalyan Ram and Nivetha Thomas acting

Background score

Minus Points

Some scenes, which defy logic

Could do with little more attention to detail

‘118’ is Directed by KV Guhan and produced by S Mahesh Koneru, while Shekar Chandra scored the music for this movie.

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