Star actress Samantha’s emotional sci-fi drama, Yashoda directed by the duo Hari-Harish has hit the screens today. Let’s see how it fares.
Story: The film revolves around a middle-class lady Yashoda(Samantha) who becomes a surrogate for money to meet the expenses of her sister’s treatment. After admitting to a facility for the same, Yashoda learns about illegal activities regarding surrogacy. What will Yashoda do later? How is a surrogate Dr. Gautham( Unni Mukundan) and a lady named Madhubala( Varalaxmi Sarathkumar) involved in the entire mafia? What is the actual story behind Yashoda tilting surrogate, forms the crucial crux.
Performances: Samantha’s screen presence and her settled performance as Yashoda are major advantages for the movie. Her acting in all key scenes brings depth to the proceedings. Samantha even did risky stunts in the movie and she is fine in her action avatar.
Varalaxmi Sarathkumar did her negative shaded role quite effectively. Her combination scenes with Samantha add weight to the narrative.
Unni Mukundan is good as a doctor with wrong intentions. Rao Ramesh is okay with her usual acting as a greedy politician. While Murali Sharma is fine in his dual-shaded character, Sampath Raj, and Shatru among others are decent in cop roles.
Padding artists such as Madhurima, Kalpika Ganesh, Divya Sripada, and Priyanka Sharma did their part decently.
Technicalities: Mani Sharma’s background score is good as it adds a solid weightage to a few key scenes but is loud at parts. The cinematography work by M. Sukumar is superb as he captured the mood of the film nicely. Editing by senior editor Marthand K Venkatesh is alright but he would have trimmed close to ten minutes in the first half. The Artwork by Ashok is fine. The fights composed by Venkat are good.
Dialogues written by Pulagam Chinnarayana, and Dr. Challa Bhagyalaxmi are apt to the film’s genre. Production design work is good but VFX and graphics work is dull. Production values for this star-studded film are good.
Analysis: Firstly, the director duo Hari-Harish should be appreciated for coming up with a fresh point. The loopholes in the surrogate births are established nicely but the execution part has a few cliches.
The first forty minutes of the film runs on a flat and slow note without many exciting proceedings. Instead, the team would have come up with some racy scenes. Adding to it, though the actual story unfolds from pre-interval, the audience is left with a few unanswered questions related to Unni’s character towards the climax portions.
To summarize, Yashoda is a thriller that has an interesting storyline told mostly in an engaging way. The important twists are revealed with an engaging narrative making the film a passable watch.
Verdict: Watchable emotional thriller!
Rating: 2.75/5
