Eeswaran is a rural drama written and directed by Susienthiran, that has Silambarasan and Nidhhi Agerwal in the lead roles while Bharathiraja, Bala Saravanan and Nandita Swetha play crucial supporting roles. The film is produced by Balaji Kapa, KV Durai, and MD Sharafudeen under the banners Madhav Media and D Company respectively.
Periyasamy (played by Bharathiraja) is an old man living alone in his village after his wife passes away and his children move to the city. His only company is Eeswaran (STR). Citing COVID lockdown as a reason, he asks all his family members to spend the lockdown with him. The problems they face in the village and how Periyasamy's past affects them forms the rest of the plot.
In what is STR's first film in close to 2 years, we get our first glimpse of the star only after a while. But from that point onwards, his energy is inimitable. This should have worked in the film's favour but instead this seems to be the only redeeming factor in this rural, family drama that falls short in engaging you.
For a star like Simbu, his screen presence should have elevated the scenes exponentially, but the film does opposite and it looks like the scenes have been written to elevate Simbu's screen presence. This works to an extent but when the threshold is reached the mass scenes don't excite you as much as it should have.
Among the performances of the supporting cast, Bala Saravanan's counters lands at few places and his combination scenes with STR finds its spot among the positives. Nidhhi Agerwal, and Nandita Swetha have a limited screentime and don't get enough space to showcase their acting skills. While Bharathiraja scores well in most scenes, at times it becomes heavily melodramatic.
Thaman's songs are pretty much enjoyable, the background score is loud and even overshadows the dialogues at a few places. The cinematography and editing too doesn't bring anything special to the table and is very ordinary. For example the repeated closeups to Simbu's face in a lot of scenes doesn't add up to the film's advantages.
In addition to all this, the film offers nothing unique apart from STR's physical changeover. With a wafer-thin screenplay that has a slow pace, banking on the star's value alone doesn't do any good. In fact, till a few minutes into the second half, we don't even know what the main conflict of the story is. And the film takes the entire first half to establish the characters alone, with most of them being insignificant to the proceedings.
If the film had a proper conflict around which the story was built, and if the film had taken more time to flesh out proper arcs for a few more characters, the emotional connect would have been better, which would have made the film very different from what it is, in a positive way.