‘Illa’ Movie Review: An Experimental Film But a Tiring Watch

Directed by Rajprabhu, ‘Illa’ only has one character in the film.

Illa has aimed to create an experimental movie experience by featuring only one character throughout.

(Photo Courtesy: Facebook/ILLA Kannada Movie)

A one-of-a-kind film in Indian cinema, Kannada thriller Illa, directed by Rajprabhu, is a 114-minute film featuring just one character. It is a refreshing change to listen to monologues and understand his thought process scene by scene. The narrative takes a path less traveled, presenting a single man’s fight with an unrecognisable evil.

It’s intriguing to see a delusional transaction taking place right in the midst of a dense jungle. The lead character, Satish, is a simpleton who sticks to his routine of going to office and returning home soon after. A man who seems to be comfortable in his own skin, Satish stays all by himself in a quaint little apartment.

However, the story kicks off when Satish starts observing strange things happening in his house. He is baffled and distressed to witness eggs breaking on its own, spurts of blood in his kitchen, lights flickering very often, and the television getting switched on by itself.

As he struggles to figure out the reason behind these eerie incidents, he finds himself stuck in the elevator, convulsed, helpless, and gasping for breath. In the process of dealing with these circumstances, he loses himself and begins questioning his own state of mind.

It is in the second half of the movie that Satish realises the rationale behind his troubles. And thus comes a flashback.

Satish goes on an outing to Yelagiri, a jungle in the middle of hills. He gets lost in the wild after his car breaks down. Everything takes a turn for the worse when he accidentally rips a piece of cloth tied to a tree.

After beating his head over it, Satish finally concludes that the piece of fabric he had torn was causing all the trouble. He arrives at a decision to get back to the jungle, find the very same tree, and try to undo what he did.

The cinematography presents a picture of the protagonist’s lone struggle, but many of the scenes are slow-paced and excessively dramatised, to a point where it becomes quite boring to look at the same character on screen, leaving the audience piqued.

Rajprabhu, who is also the lead actor in the film, has managed to arouse curiosity in the audience by keeping the suspense alive. However, as the film enters the second-half, the plot becomes shaky and the screenplay becomes lopsided, leaving the audience impatient and peeved.