But these aren’t really twists - it’s basically presenting a certain fact to the viewer before arbitrarily telling her that it was all a lie. But the twists haven’t ended: We get an information dump near the end that reveals that there’s a secret between Anu and Shankar, Anu isn’t as naive as she looks, and Mahi was never really a cop. Mahi and Anu end up colluding, they plan to break the safe together and run away with the money. But this half-twist is abandoned for a new one. Briefly, you’re led to believe that this is an unhinged cop who might attack Anu. We get some exposition through Mahi’s dialogues about how cops are frustrated in their jobs and why you can’t really blame them for acting violently sometimes. Though he comes looking for Shankar, he ends up spending the evening with her. We get an even weaker twist when Anu meets Mahi Varma (Kishore), a police officer who knocks on her door when she’s alone. It’s the kind of twist that’s unsatisfying because a fact (Shankar is a bad guy) was hidden from us, simply to be revealed at a more convenient point with no intelligent surprise. While a bit of backstory does indeed make Anu’s motivation for murder clearer, this information isn’t presented organically. Instead it tries too hard – and too predictably – to justify Anu’s morality. Unlike, say, Bhramam, where a young wife is married to a much older man, Erida doesn’t allow its characters to get on with scheming against each other. Erida begins with an amoral tone but very quickly gets into questions of moral right and wrong. We’re given an information dump about his impotence and how he treats Anu merely as an acquisition (or ‘a lucky charm’ as he puts it). But out of nowhere, we get a backstory about how Anu is with him only because her family couldn’t pay off their debts to him. Initially, we are introduced to a seemingly well-adjusted Anu and Shankar. The first twist in the film is that Shankar is actually a bad guy. They’re so obvious that the twists spoil the film’s viewing far more than disclosing them in a review could. Several ‘twists’ are added to this familiar thriller trope, but every twist in Erida is less convincing than the last.
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So, if Anu is to really free herself from Shankar, she not only needs to loot the safe in their home, she also needs him dead. But beneath a sophisticated surface, Erida is a familiar tale of revenge narrated without any suspense: Anu, still in her twenties, is married to Shankar Ganesh (Nassar) who keeps her practically imprisoned in a lonely bungalow he’s over sixty and insecure about her. And the only female character, Anu (Samyuktha Menon) stays in a posh and well-appointed bungalow throughout the film. Male characters wear expensive suits, hang out in upscale gambling dens and pepper conversations with awkward English phrases while a remix of Beethoven’s fifth symphony backgrounds their poker games. Director VK Prakash’s Erida is stylized to appear like a chic thriller.