Mask Is One Of The Worst Tamil Films Of 2025

VIKARNAN ASHOK'S Mask begins in chaos. Not of the good cinematic kind. It’s not a film with a handful of characters overwhelmed by their own endgames. It’s not the cinema where chaos is orchestrated to give the audience a high, one where so many things happen so fast that we hold our breath in unison, only for that single moment to strike when we let loose. Mask inadvertently orchestrates chaos. It has a narration voiced by director Nelson Dilipkumar. It has overlapping dialogues, layer over layer, along with this narration. It also has GV Prakash’s incongruent score. We witness a loot, Money Heist style but with MR Radha masks and then Nelson introduces us to a host of characters, chiefly Velu (Kavin), who has caused two deaths thanks to his paramour Rathi (Ruhani Sharma), and Bhoomi (Andrea Jermiah), a philanthropist who saves children from human trafficking but she might also be into the flesh trade and probably moonlights as a power broker. Confused much? Mask is one such hurriedly put-together meal of different cuisines with no flavour profile.

Velu is a private eye with total disregard for privacy. He specialises in sneaking into bedrooms, capturing extramarital affairs in action and offering leverage to his clients. It is all very crude, and the film lives up to this crassness, which remains the only consistent aspect of it from start to finish. As the masked gang steals around 440 crores, Bhoomi — hand in glove with a politician looking to fund his election campaign — hires Velu to find it all. Not a lot of this makes sense, but Nelson’s voiceover is there to state the obvious, offer empty philosophical quips, and rationalise the decisions of the characters. You know the writing is weak when a voiceover must guide the narrative in the most literal ways.

It’s interesting, Vikarnan, who has also written the film, made Bhoomi a woman. If you swap her with a male actor, nothing in the film really changes. It’s almost like a placeholder female character that Vikarnan had to write, and Andrea’s Chandra hangover from Vada Chennai filled the rest of the gaps. Much of this film exists without reason. Redin Kingsley plays a nothing character, simply because he is Redin Kingsley, and people tend to laugh just looking at him. Only that belief is wrong, and most of us are irritated by his ubiquity. Why are they wearing MR Radha masks? Is there a backstory or at least a philosophy underpinning this decision? No, it just gives Vikarnan a reason to use the great actor’s iconic lines in a song.

There is something about Breaking Bad and Money Heist (name dropped at least three hundred thousand times) fans turning filmmakers in Tamil cinema. They seem to forget the one thing that made those series great—the writing. What Vikarnan brings here is postmodernism that is at least ten years too late. Soodhu Kavvum — the premier dish of irony in Tamil cinema — too is name-dropped twice, but what was inventive, organic and nonchalant in that film is forced, clumsy and tasteless here. With the incoherent filmmaking where neither the edit pattern nor the dialogues cohere, what we get is one of the worst Tamil films of 2025.

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