★★★★★
Amazon miniTV's latest short, Recommended For You, is a modern-day thriller with modern-day content. Unlike other frictional thrillers, mysteries, and suspense dramas, this one is quite realistic as per our convenience. We all play mobile games and browse the internet on laptops or PCs, so we're bound to click on those ad links - forcefully and inadvertently. Recommended For You is about the same internet craziness and how it can take you into the cyber world of crime. The short thriller has a game format, but it isn't just about that. Rather, you go beyond a gaming experience to see some brutal visuals, and all of it happens in quick time. The problem appears in the complexity that wasn't supposed to hurt the simplicity of this thriller./movietalkies/media/post_attachments/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/rfy-rev-5.jpg "publive-image")
Recommended For You revolves around a guy named Pranav (Ayush Mehra), who is casually watching online videos at home and suddenly clicks on a mysterious video in the recommended videos section. He goes forward and clicks all Yes thinking it would just be an internet Ad, but what happens next is unthinkably terrible and it turns his life upside down. The script offers something new, Yes, for sure, but not something that everyone can understand. I doubt if any massy brain would be intelligent enough to understand what's happening. The climax is rather tougher, even for the internet experts. Recommended For You can be recommended to those who are both cinema lovers and internet experts./movietalkies/media/post_attachments/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/rfy-rev-3.jpg "publive-image")
Ayush Mehra's performance is pretty decent, but he doesn't get that kind of on-screen exposure. The main reason for that is the camera work. It isn't a normally shot project. It's a technically advanced spectacle which requires more than just the confidence of facing a camera. An actor needs to go out of his comfort zone and normal shoot processes for this, and Ayush Mehra has done exactly that./movietalkies/media/post_attachments/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/rfy-rev-4.jpg "publive-image")
The framework required him to show his face in convex angles, which naturally damaged his handsome image, which every actor is desperate to show on camera. The dedication is commendable, but like I said, the notes are still confusing. The expressions could've been better as the focus was all on his face and zoomed frames would have captured small details easily. The rest of the cast behaves like real-life players, which provides a little extra boost to the short film.
Shamik Sengupta has made a challenging film for sure, but I don't think technical challenges can ever be bigger than basic cinematic elements. Recommended For You lacks the basic formulas of thrillers that even the masses would understand. Sengupta's short film is more like a festival material or artistic attempt than a mainstream product. That's what caused the downfall here. The complexity overtakes the simple value of suspense and destroys your viewing experience to its core. Thankfully, the modern idea and casual-looking performances save the day for him. As a whole, too many pop-ups irritate you just like they usually do while using the internet, but the idea is to warn you, which definitely clicks right.
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