Vadhandhi: The Fable Of Velonie: And the mystery deepens

It is not easy to sustain the mystery of a murdered girl for eight episodes. Vadhandhi: The Fable Of Velonie in Tamil, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, gets the narrative to its  finishing line without tugging and pushing too hard. It is a well-crafted murder mystery with the correct doses of red herrings strewn across an arching landscape.

A lot of the episodes are shot in a quaint, pretty lodge run by an ironfisted single mother with a daughter Velonie, who insists on flirting with every male who catches her attention. It could be the smitten boy from her church choir Jones (Vaibhav Murugesan) or the middle-aged  writer Sebastian (Nassar) who rents a room in the lodge and befriends the over-friendly Velonie.

Velonie, played with butterfly sprint  by newcomer Sanjana, is at once an incorrigible flirt and and an innocent gamine. That she tends to react with over-enthusiasm to male attention is  Velonie’s one fatal flaw. But does that make her an open target for sexual assault? This disturbing question was raised with ample velocity years ago in the Oscar winning Jonathan  Kaplan’s The Accused. If a girl is flirtatious, even promiscuous, does she “invite” rape?

Vadhandhi The Fable Of Velonie goes the other way: Velonie is “innocent”. She has no clue  that she challenges the libido of men around her. It is  a seriously problematic assumption in  today’s day and age of Tinder and sexting. Locked in an Arcadian capsule the series works fine as a tale of oblivious self-assertion.

Andrew Louis’ direction takes the  long  route to the denouement. Men  fascinated  by Velonie’s  “innocent flirtation”  come and go(so does the  cop  Vivek’s wife who like  all cops’ wives  on screen  feels  neglected) while the  two investigating cops Vivek(S J Suryah) and  Ramar(Vivek Prasannah)  follow one lead  after another .

Multiple  deadends are allowed since  this is a sprawling webseries with enough space for misapprehensions.  However too many misleading plot points tend to dilute the  impact   of the  murder mystery.Curiously  the series begins with a false lead when the body discovered is erroneously  said to  belong to  a  well-known  actress. From this  false beginning  Velonie’s  tale remains  largely airy and  innocuous  until the final episodes when the going gets irredeemably  sordid .

Scenes of  sexual violence  tinged with  blobs of horror and  mythology(the  flavours  of the  season)  shot in  the  forests  almost seem to belong to  another series altogether.

Vadhandhi: The Fable Of Velonie  is a strangely arresting crime  thriller where the  main suspects  are  eventually cocooned in a  shield of  blamelessness while the  culprits are shown to be depraved  primitive  types.

There is  also a very strange  twist in the plot  whereby consent is not  only about  ‘No Means No’ it seems  yes can  also mean no.

If you promise not to look too closely, this series promises you an interesting, even intriguing time.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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