Test: An Entertaining Drama That Tapers Off By The End

IT’S BEEN OVER TWO DECADES SINCE Aayutha Ezhuthu and we once again have Madhavan and Siddharth locked in an intense struggle right in the heart of Chennai. Not far from each other either. If it was Napier Bridge in the 2004 Mani Ratnam film, it is a stone’s throw away at Chepauk in S Sashikanth’s directorial debut Test (a Netflix release). If it was political and ideological in the earlier film, it is emotional and personal in this one. Siddharth is Arjun here as well — not a confused young man eyeing the American dream but a patriot wearing India’s Test cricket whites, a star batsman, the kind whose class is evident even if he is on his last legs. Twenty years on, a star cricketer from Tamil Nadu playing for India isn’t as implausible. But India playing Pakistan at home in test cricket? That stuff can happen only in fiction in 2025. And Madhavan here is Saravanan, a washed-up tragic scientist, an eternal striver as deep in insecurities as he is in debt.

Written by Suman Kumar, Test begins in earnest and ups the dramatic scale quickly and economically. There isn’t much exposition; we get the interpersonal relationships purely by the stakes and conflict introductions. Saravanan is working on hydro fuel and is looking to win a grant to change his fate and that of the country’s pollution problem. His wife Kumudha (Nayanthara), a teacher, juggles a childhood connection with Arjun and just happens to teach Arjun and Padma’s (Meera Jasmine) son Adi at school. And Arjun is looking to keep his place in the Indian cricket team as a high voltage series against Pakistan hangs in balance at MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chepauk. Sashikanth’s debut is impressive for its sustained pace and the cricket portions, the realest they have looked in a long time in Indian cinema, almost like watching live action on television.

The film revolves around the characters of Arjun and Saravanan — both talented, both cunning — and their egos, which for one is as big as his success, and for the other, as big as his failure. Caught between them are their respective families, and importantly, Kumudha. Sashikanth milks the potential from this tale of jealousy and revenge, where cricket, spot fixing, and more serious crimes intermingle. Test is a breeze in the first hour, the events are minimal but effective, the dynamics between all the characters come to the fore. We know Arjun’s spot in the team is in trouble and he’s not one to take it lying down. We know Saravanan’s failures in his professional and personal lives taunt him, and all the playful mockery can only last so long. Everyone brings a regret to their story — Saravanan’s endless search for a breakthrough, Arjun with his past and future, and Kumudha with her longing to become a mother. Add to this Saravanan’s apparent ineptitude in that endeavour, one that is now marked by disinterest.

From here on, Test slowly becomes a chore, a personal struggle coexisting with a spot fixing scandal, domestic woes and a cat and mouse game with the police. In another throwback to Aayutha Ezhuthu, Madhavan gets an outburst at the famed broken bridge in Chennai, a clunky scene in which he quotes Jack Kerouac and lays down his excuse for madness. His is the louder, showier part, and he is perfect in it to the point of being unlikable. His slow descent into depravity makes sense for a man who suffers no fools but has seen one too many failures. While Siddharth’s part is almost vanilla, and all we want to judge are his cricketing shots, Nayanthara’s performance possesses an erratic calibration.

First, for a woman who goes through what she does over the period of a test match, she looks like she could walk into a grand wedding and not look out of place. Second, her fondness for cricket and Arjun, in that order, is endearing at first but once Sashikanth foregrounds her motherly instincts, almost everything becomes exaggerated. Though there is precedence for her relationship with children, how she deals with Adi — the son of a star Indian cricketer — is too outlandish for it to be plausible. It’s not that these events cannot happen, just that after a point, a lot of things feel inconsistent with her character and actions. At one point, she asks Saravanan, ‘Yen ipdi loosu mathiri panra (Why are you doing these insane things)?’, a phrase that screams laziness if you think in Tamil.

There is a dialogue between a police officer curiously named Isaac Akhilan and Arjun whose last name is Venkatraman. Arjun realises that Akhilan used to be a bowler, and that they played together in their younger days. He wonders aloud why Akhilan became a policeman and not a cricketer. Akhilan replies “why discuss old politics”. It is a throwaway line that makes sense to us but is more virtue hoarding than anything. The film isn’t going to do anything about this, so why go there? There is a film here, and probably in Suman’s script that goes deeper into the class difference between Arjun and Saravanan. But Test is not that; it is a film that is happy to deliver a lot of drama with some cricket thrown in as novelty.