Scene review: Suriya at his best in a delightful crime comedy

DSP Inbaraj (Suriya) never reads a case file himself. He makes his juniors read the forensic reports aloud, again and again, while he smokes, slouches about in shorts and hands in yet another resignation for Stephen (Lal), his long-suffering boss, to turn down. It plays like the arrogance of a burnt-out genius. Jithu Madhavan, making his Tamil debut after Romancham and Aavesham, lets the joke run long enough to feel like a character trait, then reveals what it was covering for. Scene is full of setups like that, and nearly all of them pay off.

The case that drags Inbaraj back is a murder that copies the Perfume Killer, a serial killer he put away years ago. The man behind it is Eeswaran (Naslen), a young contract killer who approaches murder with the calm of someone clocking in for a shift. Hiding a weakness the film reveals early, and one best discovered in the theatre, Inbaraj cannot lean on the police, so he puts together a team of his own: Maya (Nazriya Nazim), the house help he hires; his father Irudayaraj (Anandaraj), a forensic expert whose memory comes and goes; and his mother, a profiler who is rarely far from a drink.

A premise this odd needs a star willing to look foolish, and Suriya, after a long run of earnest heroes, seems thrilled to oblige. Inbaraj sulks, loses arguments and gets outwitted, and Suriya happily takes the jokes on the chin, several of them at the expense of his own stardom. The callbacks to his older hits arrive as throwaway gags rather than applause cues, which makes the handful of mass moments land all the harder, because the story has actually built towards them. His timing is sharp, his ease is infectious, and of his three releases this year, after Karuppu and Vishwanath and Sons, this is the one where he looks like he is having the most fun.

He has a terrific opponent in Naslen, who is the film’s best surprise. Known for affable boy-next-door roles, he plays Eeswaran without a single villain’s flourish. He fusses over logistics, celebrates a plan that works with a child’s glee and turns cold a moment later, and the odd Malayalam line slipping into his Tamil makes him an outsider who has settled in far too comfortably. When the two finally circle each other, the film finds a rhythm it never really loses. Nazriya, back in Tamil after more than a decade, slots in between them as if the part was written around her. Her Maya is quick, cheeky and unimpressed by Inbaraj’s moods, carries a problem of her own without the film making a show of it, and gets a fight scene in which Suriya is more than happy to play second fiddle.

What lifts Scene above a clever two-hander is Jithu’s interest in everyone around them. Every member of Inbaraj’s team has something wrong with them, and instead of parking those flaws as quirks, Jithu builds the investigation out of them. Clues have to pass through a father who is brilliant one moment and lost the next, a mother whose read on people outlasts her sobriety, and a detective who will not admit what he needs. Anandaraj gets his most rewarding part in years, and much of the joy comes from watching people who can barely share a house become indispensable to one another.

That humour carries the Malayalam rhythm of Aavesham, built on awkward pauses, deadpan reactions and wordplay, and not all of it survives the move into Tamil. It shows mostly in the opening hour, which spends too long on introductions, with Lal playing Stephen very broadly and the banter between two junior officers (Suresh Mathiyazhagan and Rajpriyan) proving an acquired taste. The comedy also crowds out the crime at times. There are only a handful of murders and investigation scenes for a serial killer story, a few breakthroughs come too easily, and Eeswaran never gets a motive beyond the job. The romance between Inbaraj and Maya turns up sooner than the film has prepared for, and some of that screen time would have been better spent on Naslen, who is kept waiting in the wings for too long.

None of this does much damage, because the film is so confident in its tone. Sushin Shyam, also new to Tamil cinema, writes a score that never shouts, sliding between comedy and suspense without announcing either, and the songs are folded into scenes so smoothly that the story never stops for a number. Vineeth Augustian shoots the house and the city in warm, lived-in colours, Ajmal Sabu’s cutting gives the final stretch its snap, and the film is light enough on gore to make easy family viewing despite its premise. Inbaraj has spent his career being the man with all the answers. His smartest move here is letting other people supply them, and Suriya, giving up chunks of the frame to Naslen and Nazriya, seems to have learnt the same lesson.