Trauma

Sexual crimes have become the go-to place for filmmakers to find easy conflicts. It has become a license for all the on-screen violence of the protagonist and the viewer is expected to get a cathartic release seeing such revenge stories. In the end, the victim or the sexual violence itself is just reduced to nothing more than a conflict or a reason for the story. Trauma is yet another addition to the list of such Tamil films, which are on the rise now. However, director Thambithurai Mariyappan should be lauded as he at least doesn’t capture such violence with an exploitative gaze, which has become the norm. Such maturity is shockingly absent in other aspects of Trauma, which comes across as the work of a novice short-filmmaker. As far as the story goes, Trauma follows three narratives because it wants to be a hyperlink film, which is in vogue now (thanks to Lokesh Kanagaraj). We have two petty thieves who go about stealing cars. They are straight out of Tamil black-and-white comedy dramas because they seem to not even know how much a second-hand car would sell for. They wonder whether an SUV would sell for twenty thousand rupees, and that’s supposed to be funny.