A detective story about a series of murders of twins that brings the investigator to the dark side of revenge and childhood trauma.
Eleven starts with a charred body and delivers on a twisty thriller. We have a masked serial killer, a spate of killings of twins, and the case falling into the hands of Aravind (Naveen Chandra), the typical stoic, super-cop who can seemingly crack anything. He systematically works out the clues, with the help of officer Manohar (Dileepan), and discovers the sickening truth: the killer is manipulating surviving twins into killing their own siblings. His name? Benjamin. His motives? Unknown. That sounds like a dark, gripping story.
What we receive, however, is akin to that friend who constantly says he/she has a massive surprise, but you can see the gift wrap a mile off. The mask of the villain, the cop who does everything right and keeps an inscrutable face, is horrifying. The killer has an intricate, 5D-chess kind of scheme that simply works? The movie holds your hand and tells you where it is headed. It is not so much that you are solving it with Aravind as that you are waiting to have him tell you what is becoming more and more apparent.
The scenes pass by in snapshot mode: a murder, a discussion in a police station, an interrogation, a visit to a doctor. The events do not stand a chance of developing naturally. The most prominent is a 20-minute long flashback in which Shanthi (Abhirami), an educationist, tells the previous history of the killer at her school, rather than earning emotion, she forces it. There has to be a motive, and this one is founded on the wobbly foundation of an inexcusable negligence of a vulnerable student by a school.
On the positive side, the movie is visually quite slick (good job by cinematographer Karthik Ashokan), and the background score by Imman provides a good atmosphere. Naveen Chandra excels as the angry cop, and Abhirami fulfills her role as the expositor of the plot. Sye Shashank and Dileepan are sufficient. The somewhat ambiguous conclusion is a refreshing stroke against a tidy conclusion. At least it had the sense to leave certain questions unanswered.
Director
Lokkesh Ajls
Writer
Lokkesh Ajls
Stars
Abhirami, Naveen Chandra, Reyaa