Madha Analysis

Madha (2020)

Directed by: Srividya Basawa

Starring: Trishna Mukherjee

Madha is an authentic and a strong depiction of psychological trauma, as the director Srividya Basawa spoke in an interview with TNR about how she went through a lot of trauma herself. The interesting part about the film is that the plot in itself is like trauma, where you have nightmares that someone frames you for something you didn't do or as something you aren't and you are tortured. This story coincidentally has slight similarities to Steven Soderberg's Unsane which was shot on an iPhone 7 Plus. But Unsane was released in 2018 and Madha was started way before that. There are interesting twists and turns in the film. The revelation of the twists could've been done in a more stylish way, but I don't know if she wanted that tonality for the film.

Trishna Mukherjee does a good job in playing, Nisha, especially the asylum sequences. Venkat Rahul who plays Arjun, the love interest of Nisha, didn't fit the role. He gives creepy looks, which is good acting but he's so obviously creepy and it doesn't feel like Nisha is being deceived, to some extent it feels like Nisha is being stupid for trusting him (but yeah, the ending justifies some of that). Probably, Vinod Varma would've been an interesting choice for that role, he was so deceptive in D-16. The entire psychology professor episode didn't work for me, the professor and essentially the film maker was lecturing the audience about their views on psychology. 

The film maker has used a lot of cinematic tools to depict trauma, including the color palette, lighting and the sound design. There's a scene where Nisha is all disturbed and when her colleagues are casually talking to each other beside her she gets disturbed by it. Aravind Menon, the sound mixer mixes the sound in that scene in a way that we feel and experience how she is feeling and hearing their voices louder than they are. The DOP, Abhiraj Nair left a lot of shadows to be there in scenes, especially the asylum sequences and the psychology professor's lecture scenes to bring more realism. Also the shots in Nisha's house, the bathroom scene where she freaks out and wakes everyone up feels so intimate because of the wide lenses they used. 

But, I had an issue with the usage of music in this film. Naresh Kumaran's music sounds good, but they overuse it. There is music in scenes where there is nothing happening, and it feels like the music is trying to create tension there but it just feels more taxing to watch. I had this issue with Phanindra Narsetti's Manu as well. I could also sense some of the background score in this film similar to Manu's background score. When they have brilliant sound designers, Sync Cinema, I thought that they should've emphasised or pushed foley/ambiance more in some scenes than music. The editing by Renjith Touchriver felt noticeable and a bit repetitive at times because almost every transition from a scene to the next was done using a fade to black. I'm not complaining about this, but probably finding some creative cut points would've been more interesting to watch.

This film has aesthetic visuals and good sound design, it has a good theatrical experience but the storytelling is uncompromisingly intimate which is why this film might not be a great communal experience. There's a scene where the camera slowly pushes into Nisha in the asylum sequence where she's just saying something and I could sense the audience losing patience and murmuring something and that took me out of the scene. Had I been watching this in Netflix, I'd have not been interrupted by the audience like this. I felt the same for Manu as well, that too was an intimate film, the conversations in that film are intimate to an extent that they should cheesy when you look at them in a group. Even if the film doesn't do well in theatres, also because of the shutdown due to COVID-19, it'll an interesting film to watch on streaming services.