John Doe review: Madhumita and Arjun Das land a smart, moving thriller

Chandru (Arjun Das) throws up at his first crime scene, and somewhere in his head his father is already sneering about it. The father (Badava Gopi) is dead, but his voice is not, and it is the most frightening presence in John Doe, Madhumita’s thriller about a drowned boy nobody can name. The killer, by comparison, is easy to spot. That imbalance is the film’s weakness and, oddly, most of its appeal.

Chandru is a rookie sub-inspector in Kadampuzha, on the Kerala side of the border, and the unidentified child pulled from a lake becomes both his first case and his private guilt. Across the border in Kurinjimedu, Darshana (Srishti Y) has just moved in from Dubai with her teenage daughter Lucky (Zaara Vineet Chandhokhe) and eight-year-old Hriday (Nirav S). When Hriday disappears, Inspector A Rao (Sanchana Natarajan) takes the file, and the two cases, and the two cops, slowly converge.

Madhumita swaps the usual buddy-cop roles. Chandru wins an interrogation through patience, not a slap; Rao, whom everyone calls Rao sir without her blinking, is the one who reaches for force. In his first cop role, Arjun Das keeps that famous baritone low and unsure, a man still asking permission to be in the room. Sanchana occasionally tips into theatricality, but the stiffness suits a woman whose past the film wisely withholds, and a scrappy fight in a lodge settles that these two need each other.

The real care is in the scenes between the plot beats. Parents who learn their long-missing son is dead do not wail, because the father made peace with it years ago and the mother never did. A traumatised boy refuses to enter a psychologist’s (Karthick Kumar) room alone, and the doctor understands why. Lucky and Chandru’s competition over whose childhood was worse is funny and sore in the same breath. Preetha Jayaraman shoots the hill border through so much mist that friendly neighbours start to look like surveillance.

The whodunit is weaker. Anyone fluent in the genre will see the interval twist coming, a familiar face among the locals gives the game away, and the final stretch rushes an explanation that leaves logic gaps, including how a Kerala officer keeps working a Tamil Nadu case.

None of that cancels what the film gets right. At 149 minutes it is less interested in catching a killer than in the damage fathers do to their children, and by the end Chandru has started winning a few arguments with the voice in his head.