Decoding RA ...

Red Door - The Philosophical Journey

To err is human, to forgive is divine. The evolution of mankind has come across leaps and bounds of the trial and error method. Whether it is science or religion there is no one single outcome for any action. The will to survive has been time and again achieved through various motives and practices across the centuries.

Good vs Evil

We all can connect through Ajay. Who is Ajay? He is none other than us. In our journey called life we are subjected to various forms of influences. Losing a dear one can change the course of a man’s life. We all go through similar turmoil in our life at some juncture or the other. The incident may be any form of life changing occurrence. We all choose a path that is not laid for us. We get into depression, forgetting the reality and the people around us. We tend to get into a cocoon such as Ajay who changed his character altogether. Depression can be very dangerous. We all want to try and do the impossible such as contacting spirits as a metaphor. Thus in pursuing one objective, we get distracted even further. The red door is nothing but our inner desire to commit a sin. The color red distracts us in real life. Red color has the longest wavelength; it grabs our attention within a split of a second. The locked door is our deepest darkest desire, to let out the demon inside us. The red door appears in every one’s life at some point or another. Most of us open it and a very few resist the temptation.

The movie has various references to the calling bell that appears throughout the film. The bell serves us a warning or a wakeup call from the good side. 4th dimension is a mirror world of our figment of imagination, in fact when Ajay’s right hand freezes, his right hand is in the 4th dimension and left hand is in the real world to connect with the alternate reality. The happenings around Ajay are mostly psychological. His mind is being played with by the demon. The ending in the film refers to how we humans succumb to pressure and submit ourselves to the evil. We let the dark side rule over us. The worst of us gets the best of us.
 

Genre Bender

A genre bender is a concept that is new to Kollywood. Switching over from horror to fantasy was the intention right from the beginning of RA. RA script was constructed on a pattern that has never been done before. Mixing a wide range of horror, crime, mystery, thrill and fantasy was never before done in Tamil cinema. Such an attempt requires guts. Thus RA is a pure experimental genre. The idea of the screenplay was to change the genre of the movie every 25 minutes. It indeed worked well. There is an element of surprise every time you start guessing what is going to happen.

More to follow ... 

Prabu Yuvaraj & Ashraf