A young woman with borderline personality disorder claims that her newborn baby has been swapped for another minutes after her delivery. With not many believing her, can her loving husband, a former drug addict, investigate and track down the baby before it’s too late?
DNA Movie Review: When we first see Divya (Nimisha Sajayan) and Anand (Atharvaa), the protagonists of Nelson Venkatesan‘s DNA (the title is a clever play on their initials and on the issue the film deals with), they come across as flawed individuals who even their own families see as a burden. Divya has borderline multiple disorder, which has made it difficult to get her married, much to the frustration of her mother (Viji Chandrasekhar). Anand, on the other hand, has become a drug addict following a failed romance, and is an embarrassment to his family of highly educated individuals, particularly his father Siva Subramaniam (Chethan).By a quirk of fate, they end up getting married, but their relationship turns things around for them. And when Divya gets pregnant, they are understandably overjoyed. But minutes after her delivery, Divya says her actual newborn has been switched with another baby – a claim that seems far-fetched given that all evidence seems to be stacked against what she’s saying. But Anand decides to investigate, and finds out she isn’t imagining things. What happened to their baby, and can he track it down before it’s too late?With DNA, Nelson Venkatesan delivers a tightly knit suspense thriller about two flawed individuals discovering themselves through their marriage, and later, through the search for their missing newborn. The filmmaker takes us through the dark underbelly of the child abduction scene in the city, and keeps up the suspense — whether Divya and Anand would be able to track down their child before it’s too late — right till the climax.It helps that the actors deliver solid performances that capture the depth of the writing of their characters. We first see Anand as just another young man who hasn’t been able to reconcile with a love failure, but when we eventually get to know the real reason, we can’t help but be empathetic, and Atharvaa convinces us both when he breaks down and later when he has to turn into an action hero. Nimisha does a tightrope walk playing a character whose mental health isn’t perfect without making her into a typical Tamil cinema ‘loosu ponnu’. Then we have Balaji Sakthivel’s Chinnaswamy, a cop who’s just three weeks away from retirement, helping Anand. While he initially seems unwilling, he later sticks on with Anand till the end and Nelson shows it with a single shot without explaining it through dialogues. Even one of the antagonists — an.old woman — is given a solid reason explaining why she doesn’t view what she does as crime.The director is also ably helped by his technicians – Parthiban’s cinematography adds mood, and the lighting in a stunt in an under-construction building, in particular, is a highlight. Then there’s Ghibran Vaibodha, whose superb background score works in tandem with Sabu Joseph’s sharp cuts to amp up the tension; the duo delivers stellar work in the climax.That said, the film would have benefitted better in terms of songs. Nelson’s decision to go with five young composers might be experimental, but the absence of his regular composer Justin Prabhakaran is clearly felt here. In fact, the film could have done away with two bar songs, which sound so generic. Some of the supporting characters, like Ramesh Thilak, who plays Anand’s lawyer friend, and Anand’s father, kind of disappear after seeming prominent in the initial portions. And given the number of violent individuals Anand faces in his search, it would have added to the plausibility when we see him take on dozens of them multiple times.But he makes up for these minor missteps in the climax where he dials up the tension to deliver one of the most edge-of-the-seat suspenseful and emotionally super-charged endings that we have seen in recent times. The way in which he weaves in the film’s philosophy – Thappu senja yaarume thappikaradhilla.. Thandanaikaana kaalam thalli pogudhu – in the end is truly whistle-worthy.In these times when many a promising filmmaker seems to be looking at their initial successes as only the next step towards landing the next bigger star’s project, it’s really heartening to see a filmmaker continuing to put his script first and quietly work towards building a formidable filmography.
