‘DeAr’ movie review: A rushed, contrived relationship drama

GV Prakash Kumar and Aishwarya Rajesh in a still from ‘DeAr’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The most tangible memory one has of 2019’s Sethum Aayiram Pon is a well-paced, emotional drama about an urban woman’s journey to reconnect with her roots. Even if you could see most of its set-ups from afar, the pay-offs, measured storytelling, and the writing of the emotional beats told of a promising filmmaker who meant serious business. Now, the kind of mess DeAr turns out to be, you are compelled to double-check if it’s the same director, Anand Ravichandran, who debuted with that 2019 film.

Everything about this GV Prakash, Aishwarya Rajesh starrer feels utterly rushed, as if it was written chasing a strict deadline, or perhaps to save Prakash from the abysmal performances of his recent releases. DeAr is an acronym for Deepika and Arjun, the names of the characters played by the leads. All you are told and expected to know about these characters is this: Arjun is a light-sleeper who needs his eight hours of sleep to better function as a television journalist; Deepika is a “sound-sleeper” whose sleep apnea has been scaring away potential matrimony matches. Now, what does Deepika do? There’s a hint of her working in the HR department in Arjun’s brother Saravanan’s (Kaali Venkat) company but her career and how the events of the film should affect it are not bothered about.

Deepika hides her sleep apnea from Arjun, and the two get married in a beautiful, rainy-day wedding. Only during their wedding night does Arjun realise that good sleep is a blessing he might have to fight hard for in this marriage. The rest of DeAr follows the couple, and their families, as they grapple with the falling out of this marriage. Sounds like a gender-reversed version of last year’s Good Night? While you wish you view DeAr devoid of any comparisons, the film, unfortunately, doesn’t help itself in that regard as it fails precisely in everything Vinayak Chandrasekaran’s 2023 film stood tall in.

First and foremost, the conflict hardly sticks. The loud melancholic score desperately attempts to fill in the blanks and the characters exchange I Love You so many times, and yet, you have nothing on paper to care about these characters. And though introduced as the cornerstone of the conflict, the issue of snoring or a resolution for it is hardly explored.

Unlike the case in Good Night, which took an empathetic look at both perspectives, DeAr antagonizes Arjun and condescends his issue with his partner’s sleep apnea as something unworthy to be considered a problem. And since Arjun and Deepika are written to support that understanding, you shouldn’t be surprised if he comes across as volatile as a man who could change his ways after reading a motivational forward on WhatsApp. At one point Deepika says that she expected Arjun to let go of the snoring like how she let go of a mistake he made in a trivia he mentioned during their first meeting; who are these people who talk like this?

What really makes DeAr a vexing affair is the evident rush in the screenplay. Look at the series of events that lead up to the couple’s falling out; right at the beginning, Arjun tells Deepika of his wishes to get a job at ABS News and to interview the Finance Minister of India. You’d expect this to get played out dramatically to reach an emotional high point but shortly after all of this, Arjun gets the job and secures the Minister’s interview, it all goes haywire as expected thanks to his sleep deprivation, and he cries for a divorce. None of it registers and you are left wondering if there’s something more impressive in store that the film is restless to tell you about. That sadly isn’t the case.

Anand doesn’t stop to even create organic drama between the characters. The first time Arjun’s family — for all that we are told of the dominant roles they play in Arjun’s life — speaks to him about his decision to divorce Deepika is at the premises of the court after the first hearing; what were they doing in the meantime?

All the time he saves in rushing us through this ruptured relationship, Anand tries to weave contrived arcs for Saravanan, a misogynist who treats his wife, Kalpana (Nandhini), like a subservient; and his mother (Rohini), who yearns for her long-abandoned husband to come back. Strangely, of all the moral lessons we are painstakingly told from these arcs, you wish you had gotten more of the equation between Deepika and her father (Ilavarasu).

On top of all this, you are also asked to endure supposed attempts at comedy, the cliche soup-song-in-a-bar, random jabs at feminism, and a mind-boggling audio technique — the film has some portions dubbed and some recorded with sync-sound, and it’s jarring to watch a film that plays heavily orchestrated scores over live-recorded dialogues. If not for sleep apnea, the film perhaps has found a solution for a sleep-deprived audience: loud, jarring audio.

DeAr is currently running in theatres