Ever since Maya (2015) became a blockbuster, Nayanthara has starred in indie thrillers almost every other year. It’s a welcome change for her and for us, as we’ve come to depend on her inimitable screen presence. All the films that she’s headlined as the lone wolf aren’t fantastic. Some of them are hokey. Still, she tries to deliver something out of the ordinary and that matters a great deal in Tamil cinema.
Like Aramm (2017), in which her character rescues a little girl from a borewell, in O2, she rescues a bunch of passengers who’re stuck in a bus – in a bus that’s buried under debris. But this time, she doesn’t get to make all the decisions because she’s also in a vulnerable position. The plot of this latest survival thriller appears dangerously close to Aramm, but the major difference between the two is that the girl is replaced by a little boy.
The opening credits of O2 show the negative effects of rapid urbanization where the birds lose their homes and the cities turn into massive jenga blocks.
It’s a warning signal for what is to come later. And it’s done in a way that children of all ages can understand the simple logic behind climate change. Only after this introductory piece do we see Parvathy (Nayanthara) jumping into a talk on nature and the kind of role it plays in our world. Everything’s inter-connected; so far so good.
Parvathy is a plant expert. She seems to know what they do to survive the odds. “Survive” is the word that you’ll encounter the most in this review. O2 can also be filed under the “survival of the fittest” category. Oops, I did it again. Is this how writer-director GS Viknesh come up with the story?
Ah, Parvathy isn’t just an expert in the field of plants. She also knows the nuts and bolts of the respiratory system. This is the point that helps her win the arguments in the bus. Why does she know so much about oxygen? Well, her son, Veera (Rithvik), needs an oxygen tank to help him breathe. Won’t a mother go to any length to make her child’s life safer? Viknesh keeps bringing up this pertinent relationship between a mother and nature – mother nature. This is a message-oriented movie. But it comes without any of the loudspeakers attached to it.
Parvathy doesn’t shout in the climactic sequence. And she doesn’t bring her hands forward to plead with the viewers to plant saplings in our backyards. She’ll probably be happy if we do it though. But O2 isn’t that sort of a movie. It’s stitched together with numerous metaphors, however. All the important scenes that appear to drive the narrative are entangled with our failure to make the planet greener. Even the tiny plant that Veera looks after, and which he carries around, acts as a plot device at a crucial juncture. It’s not a master stroke. Nevertheless, it does its job.
The passengers, like any movie that features a cast of characters, belong to different schools of thought – a woman and a man who’re ready to elope, the woman’s casteist father, a corrupt cop who’s also the villain, an ex-convict, an ex-MLA, and so on. The men cannot get into useless fights to prove their alpha tendencies, but they still come to blows whenever an opportunity arises. To be fair, though, it’s only the cop who threatens everybody else with a gun.
Veera and Parvathy have to go to a hospital, the cop has to be at a certain place at a certain time to receive a share of the bribe, and the ex-convict has to tell his mother that he has committed no crime. All of them have tasks to do. And all of their tasks involve the now-or-never degree of risk. But this emotional urgency somehow never feels tangible. As the nature of survival thrillers goes, the passengers struggle to keep themselves alive.
O2, in many ways, falls between a hit and a miss. You get a parent’s agony in the same place where a man’s greed consumes him. There are touching scenes followed by empty gestures of apathy. The claustrophobic environment may not have given Viknesh a lot of room for him to put his characters away from each other. This is again the biggest star on its shoulder and the biggest blob of goo on its bib.
The Korean horror-thriller Train To Busan (2016) had that spring in its step. It could push you to the edge of your set. It could even topple you. Although it wasn’t limited to a single setting, it handled the parent-child equation quite delicately. That’s what I want from such a film – to be thrilling enough to forget that the characters are losing their minds.
O2 is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
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