Premistava starring Aditi Shankar, Akash Murali is releasing on 31 Jan 2025. The film features star director Shankar's daughter and interest is increasing as the film's Tamil original hit the screens during Pongal this year. Let us see what the film offered to movie lovers.
Premistava story revolves around two lovers where fate plays with their lives with shocking twists and turns. Arjun (Akash Murali) gets smitten by a beautiful girl Diya (Aditi Shankar) and finally manages to win her love.
However their romantic life hit a roadblock after sometime, Arjun comes to know shocking happenings in Diya's life. What are those shocking happenings and how Arjun's father Viswanathan (Mathew Verghese), mother Vaidehi (Sriranjani), Diya's mother Geeta (Pavitra), Adinarayana (Sarath Kumar), Vasundhara (Khushbu), Lawyer Indirani Jahan (Kalki Koechlin), Special Officer Gautam (Prabhu) are connected form rest of the narration.
Akash Murali, son of late Murali and brother of Atharva Murali, made his debut with this film. He did a decent job but requires honing his dialogue delivery, expressions and emotions. He looked similar to his brother Atharva.
Aditi Shankar looked at ease in romantic scenes and came up with cute expressions. However in emotional scenes she paled out. Kalki Koechlin played an important role of a lawyer but her role is very limited. Sarathkumar, Khushbu and Raja did justice to their roles. Prabhu made special appearance in the film.
Premistava story is penned by Vishnuvardhan. Vishnuvardhan returns to Kollywood with this film after 12 long years. He sometime back captured the imagination of all with Shershaah and this time he came up with an interesting romantic thriller. However for all the interest, the so called romantic scenes turned out to be realistic at times but mostly illogical,silly and out of place.
But the main suspense elements with which Vishnuvardhan concentrated completely, failed due to contrived screenplay. There are very little twists and the screenplay turned out to be predictable and unidimensional. He showed everything conveniently with the protagonist solving everything with in no time with all clues coming to him. The climax generates little interest with few multiple twists.
Vishnuvardhan's story has many moral flaws with the makers conveniently taking the protagonist side and trying to justify in whatever way he acts vis a vis the female lead.
Sreekar Prasad's editing is quite sleek except for few drags. The music of Yuvan Shankar Raja is soulful and soothing. It is melodious and songs are shot in a beautiful way. He elevated the scenes with his background music. Cinematography of Cameron Eric Bryson is good and turned the scenes beautiful and colorful. Production values are good.
On the whole, Premistava promises a lot but delivers less. Vishnuvardhan for all his talent failed to do justice to it and little fine-tuning of the script and the inclusion of few more twists and turns would have made a powerful impact. He got a good cast and crew but they despite their hard work and dedication failed to live up to the expectations. There are many scenes similar to the earlier films. Considering all these elements, Cinejosh goes with a 1.5 rating for Premistava.