Immortal review: a neat trap with loose rules

A luxury apartment in Chennai for five thousand rupees a month is either a miracle or a threat, and Magi (GV Prakash Kumar) takes far too long to check which. He works at his uncle’s printing press, his landlord wants him out, and the woman offering the room is Sindhu (Kayadu Lohar), so every warning sign loses to the prospect of living with her. It is also the film’s best trick. Sindhu is a monster in human form, and she is persuasive not because of the glamour the camera keeps lingering on but because she reads what a person wants and hands it to him. She barely has to set a trap when he is this eager to walk into it.

Sindhu with the coffee and the smile. The rent is the least suspicious thing about her.

Writer-director Mariyappan Chinna, making his debut, opens a thousand years earlier with a birth that goes horribly wrong, then leaves that secret hanging over Magi’s good fortune. The first forty-odd minutes are the weakest part. The romance runs on Magi blushing and gawking, while a friend (Aaditya Kathir) and the uncle (Lollu Sabha Maaran) produce more filler than laughs. It is the standard GV Prakash horny-bachelor mode, and by now it plays like a default setting rather than a character choice. What keeps the first half moving are the small oddities planted around the flat, details that look very different after the interval.

Once the interval locks Magi in, Immortal wakes up. One man, one apartment he cannot leave, a housemate who controls every inch of it. The setup owes more to Western mystery-box television like From, where the rules of the place are the horror, than to any local lore. Chinna mostly resists the jump-scare reflex, and the best unease comes from everyday routines, something as dull as ordering dinner, turning sinister. Sam CS’s score keeps the pressure on, though it blares every time someone walks into a room. Arun Radhakrishnan finds enough angles to keep the apartment from going stale, and Rajesh M’s cut caps the film at 131 minutes.

Kayadu Lohar is the reason the trick works. She plays warmth and menace with the same smile, which makes her hospitality the creepiest thing on screen. GV Prakash sells the panic better than the flirtation. TM Karthik, as someone who learnt about Sindhu the hard way, brings welcome gravity to his few scenes.

Once the door shuts, Magi’s job is to look scared, and GV Prakash does that well.

The cracks show once the script has to explain its monster. Sindhu has powers whenever the screenplay needs an obstacle and conveniently looks away whenever Magi needs to learn something, and the ancient prologue promises a richer history than the explanation delivers. The finale also ditches the claustrophobia for an extended creature brawl and some hero posturing, then rushes the resolution. The creature itself looks fine in glimpses and less fine the longer it stays on screen. Magi works as a frightened ordinary man. Giving him hero shots breaks the spell.

For all the holes in its mythology, Immortal rarely wanders once the door shuts. That discipline, and Kayadu Lohar’s smile, make it a decent theatre watch. 3.25/5.