24 frames per second

The premise is the equivalent of a clickbait headline. A boy with anger management issues is told by his mother to hold it in for 6 days of the week, and then if he still finds himself angry about the same things on the seventh day, he can give it full rein. He grows up learning to control himself from Sunday through Friday, and then deciding on Saturday if it’s still worth getting riled up about. (I wouldn’t be spoiling the film by saying he finds plenty to rage about on said day.) His additional constraint is, if he can’t finish thrashing his Saturday target before Sunday rolls around, they get a free pass.

I know it all sounds silly when I say it, but we tell kids that life is fair, or that they can relax for the rest of their lives if they study hard in school and get into a good college, so this isn’t a stretch by any means. It makes for an interesting masala premise, in fact, and the film finds some interesting ways to make that constraint work.

The trouble is, it also makes for some very unrealistic plot elements. For instance, there’s a bunch of goons who chase him and his family every day of the week, and get their just desserts on Saturday. Given the number of goons, and how much thrashing is on display, this just comes across as asinine. It would’ve been fine if the tone of the entire film had been much lighter, but not here.

There are other things that don’t work. There’s a romantic subplot involving a love nurtured from childhood, but the romance hardly works. The female lead is a cop, but I can’t recall a single scene where the physicality of being a cop is on display, even a little bit. A ridiculous amount of blood is shed one night, but the next morning, all one seems to have to do is clean up like there was a house party with a few more drinks than expected.

But here’s the thing: so much of the film works so well that I find myself forgiving its missteps. The film is narrated in chapters, and the one named Hide and Seek has some of the most engaging masala film writing I’ve seen in a long, long time. You don’t have a villain whose only attribute is a capacity for mayhem — you can actually see a reasoning process at work. The way a bunch of conflicts — two brothers, a love triangle involving two people, the hero versus a local strongman — dovetail into one another is very well done. The last of those probably ought to have been jettisoned, or at least had a far more low-key profile, but simply the way all these things collide and carom off each other is fun to watch.

One of the things the film does beautifully is the way earlier scenes set up later ones in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. A mother’s writing on a wall finds an echo much later with something else written on a wall. The mother’s actions are reflected in those of the son as well. A young man’s obsession with the time seems like a throwaway story, until you see it fit into the plot at exactly the right moment. A father’s habit of warning the hero’s victims leads to an absolutely lovely masala moment when you least expect it. This is all lovely, lovely writing.

The performances are good, but the term that comes to mind, really, is serviceable. Nani is his usual likeable self, SJ Suryah does what can now be definitively called “his shtick”, and Saikumar has a nice turn as his dad. But what really makes or breaks this film is Vivek Athreya’s writing. And here, even with its missteps, Saripodhaa Sanivaaram offers enough little pleasures to make it worth a watch.