Sony LIV’s ‘Family Drama’ Is A Strange And Incoherent Film, Redeemed Partly By How Shamelessly It Pushes Its Contrivances

Director: Meher Tej
Cast: Suhas, Sanjay Ratha,  Pooja Kiran, Anusha Nuthula, Teja Kasarapu, Shruti Meher
Language: Telugu

How many coincidences are too many in a thriller like Family Drama? Set predominantly in one house with each member hiding their own secrets, Family Drama tries to create the opposite image of the happy family we see in detergent commercials. Apart from these secrets, all of them nurse old wounds caused by the family's patriarch and there's also a property dispute at the centre to add to the conflict. Built on mistrust and trauma, it is only natural that the two boys of this family grow up with issues of their own. But there's just too many coincidences and an implausible amount of symmetry for us to stay invested.

For instance, at least three pivotal scenes are based on characters accidentally witnessing a murder. In the first case, there's a certain amount of believability owing to how details are established before. The second time, a scooter stops working exactly at the one place in the entire universe that could have moved the screenplay forward. And when another character walks in on another murder in another coincidence, it becomes a drinking game rather than a plot point.   

The making itself is tacky and artless but I found its soap opera aesthetics adding to the film's horrors. Performances are purely functional, except for Suhas (Rama) who seems to be the only one owning the film's over-the-top madness. It's a film that wants to embrace its darkness with each of its characters being unpredictable and conniving. You begin by thinking the absolute worst of these characters and chances are, they are even worse. Stuck somewhere in between a soap opera with the gore and violence of a B-grade slasher movie, you see traces of an original idea in there somewhere and the irony of calling something like that a 'family drama'.

In what's a mostly incoherent film, you see what the makers were originally trying to do only in the film's last half hour. It abandons any semblance of logic after this point and then goes all out embracing its unhinged devotion to violence. The contrivances don't matter after that and we're just rooting for the bloodshed to continue. Technically, because there's no one character to root for or any lines of good or bad we can draw, Family Drama briefly becomes the amoral slugfest it may have wanted to be. But until then it mistakes shock value for substance, leaving us with a strange film that could have been a scathing aftermath of patriarchy passing on from one generation after another.