Naane Varuvean is a psychological horror film written and directed by Selvaraghavan and produced by Kalaipuli S Thanu under the banner V Creations. The film has Dhanush & Indhuja playing the lead roles while Yogi Babu, Prabhu, Elli AvrRam and others play supporting roles. Selvaraghavan himself appears in a cameo as well. The music is composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja, and the cinematography is handled by Om Prakash.
Selvaraghavan's second horror film on the trot to hit the screens, after Nenjam Marappathillai, has the celebrated filmmaker deal with the genre in a completely different way. In Nenjam Marappathillai, he would have portrayed the spirit in a humane way while here, it's more of a psychological thing.
Prabhu and Kathir (Both played by Dhanush) are twins who are forcefully separated in their adolescent age because an astrologer tells their mother that if they're together, one will take the life of the other. Many years later, Prabhu is happily living with his family in a city, and his only daughter starts hallucinating, which later turns out to be a spirit possessing her. What does this have to do with Prabhu's twin - Kathir is what the rest of the film is about.
Story-wise the film is very simple, and in a way predictable as well. Like other horror films, the spirit needs to exact revenge on someone and uses a human's body. However director Selvaraghavan's eccentric aesthetic sense is what makes Naane Varuvean more interesting than it should be. This is in terms of the edit, camera angles as well as the choice of background scores.
Om Prakash's camera angles and framing look very interesting, and at times unusual as well. It's not a bad thing, in fact there are places where you forget the film and just take a moment to adore the cinematography.
It is well known that Yuvan saves his best for Selvaraghavan's films and here too he doesn't disappoint. Among the songs, Veera Soora and Rendu Raaja are killer tracks, with the latter being extremely trippy. It is like a 'Kadavul Paadhi Mirugam Paadhi' from Kamal's Aalavandhaan meets 'Celebration of Life' from Aayirathil Oruvan.
The performances by Dhanush and Indhuja are mature. Even Yogi Babu has his own little moments, despite a restrained performance. The child actors come up with proper performances as well. In spite of all these positives, the engagement drops at few places especially the climax.
Naane Varuvean has a gripping first half with a superb interval block, but for most of the second half, a hype is created for the face-off between Kathir and Prabhu, but when the moment finally arrives near the climax, it is less intriguing. The last 20 minutes could have definitely been staged better, which also would have made the entire film better than what it is right now.