‘Kingston’ movie review: GV Prakash’s unanchored horror adventure is lost at sea

Let’s get one thing straight: Kingston isn’t one of those lazy cash-grabs meant to ramp a male hero into a star. There hasn’t been a sea-bound horror adventure in Tamil like this; debutant writer-director Kamal Prakash shows a knack for serious genre filmmaking, and the film looks grand and confidently-made. Yet, it sinks.

For over an hour, Kamal breathlessly rushes you through a dizzying story spanning three generations. We are told how a spirit of a man named Stephen Bose (Azhagam Perumal) has been haunting the seas of the fishing town of Thoovathur since his untimely death in 1982. All those who have gone into the ocean ever since have washed up dead, their bodies eerily blackened. With a fishing ban imposed, the locals have to resort to other means of livelihood or travel all the way to the fishing hub of Thoothukudi.

In the present day, Kingston a.k.a King (GV Prakash Kumar) smuggles Sea Cucumber in the Thoothukudi sea for his crime-lord boss, Thomas (Sabumon Abdusamad). Through a crassly choreographed song set at a funeral, we are told how money-minded King is, doing the odd job solely to buy his own boat and venture into the Thoovathur sea. Why, you ask? He doesn’t buy into the local myth of the evil spirit and is in denial that his father Charles passed away at sea. The adventure of Kingston begins — halfway into the film, mind you — when King, along with his friends (and foes), rows into the Thoovathur sea.

GV Prakash and Divya Bharathi in a still from ‘Kingston’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Oh, wait, did I tell you about his girlfriend, Rose (Divyabharathi), who gets only a flimsy connection to the larger story? Or his grandfather Martin (Kumaravel), whose nightmares connect the day Bose died to a vision of King in the ocean? Or the story of King’s friend Godson (Rajesh Balachandran) whose sister was mysteriously found dead on the shore? What about Solomon (Chetan), a powerful man in Thoovathur, who was allegedly killed along with his family by the spirit of Bose for revenge? Again, with a lot of backstory and material to cover, and too many set-ups for latter scenes, the film tries to bite off more than it could chew. The writer in Kamal attempts to use non-linear storytelling to hurtle us through the ideas; sequences are intercut to add meaning, while the screenplay pieces together the backstory only when it is needed.

The problem is that the narrative cuts back and forth in such a ragged rhythm that it hardly allows you to breathe in the world of Kingston. There’s no space for silences, punctuations or any scope for good drama. Where even the death of a character hardly finds a breather, the emotional landscape of the leads hardly matters. This is also why you feel nothing when the horror elements begin to haunt the men on the high seas. The characters we follow are no cleverer than the stereotypical horror movie chumps with no survival instincts.

Kingston doesn’t even bother telling us where the cursed sea of Thoovathur begins and ends. You would be forgiven to think this stretch of water is just a few kilometres into the ocean; however, this geographically mystifying place keeps going on and on, and you wonder what would happen to someone who ventures into this ocean not from the land but from, say, the sea in Thoothukudi. Yet, when King searches for a specific underwater relic, it’s just there under him, as if it’s all happening inside a children’s pool.

Kingston truly could have redeemed itself had the deluge of horror elements — from creepy, toothy ghouls to zombies — come together effectively. Sadly, this isn’t the case. In one instance, the boat’s engine conks off after King and his friends have just been through hell and back. You know something’s coming. There’s tension in the air. The brooding music and the atmosphere almost send chills down your spine. Yet, when something climbs onto the boat and screams at the camera, you almost cackle at the absurdity of it all.

In the end, you wonder what could have been had Kingston anchored itself to one good idea — say, the battle between Solomon and Bose — and had the characters organically figured out a nerve-wracking horror mystery with minimal fuss. It would have also helped if the film wasn’t so over-scored. Horror — the best kind — thrives in silences.

Kingston is currently running in theatres