Time to update what teenagers are capable of?

The Secret We Keep (Danish, 2025)
Miniseries

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33496221/

Imagine travelling back in time by just over a hundred years. Children were expected to express gratitude for their very existence. The mere fact that they survived the challenging early years of life and did not fall victim to infectious diseases was, in itself, a miracle. They had to be eternally thankful to their parents for safeguarding them from these harmful factors. During that era, children had no rights; they were to be seen and not heard. 

Fast forward to the 21st century. Children are no longer perceived as an annoyance; rather, family life revolves around them. They are shielded and have a detailed schedule planned. Family activities centre on them. Children have rights, and the state goes to great lengths to ensure their protection, education, healthcare, shelter, and proper nutrition, as outlined by the 1959 UN Charter which guarantees these rights. 

These achievements have been beneficial. Children are no longer merely fillers for deceased or retired workers. They require a significant period of personal development known as childhood. At this stage, nothing is expected of them except to absorb knowledge, whether actively or passively, that they can utilise in adulthood. 

The trouble is this: all the good nourishment and access to knowledge have made children mature much earlier than their forefathers. In the eyes of society (and law), nothing is expected of them. They are deemed incapable of committing any crime. In their minds, they believe they are unable to consent to anything or to engage in complex matters such as robbing a bank or wooing someone into sex. 

Guess what? The world has taken a leap of change while they were napping. The ease of acquiring information from the World Wide Web at a moment's notice has replaced traditional discussions about ‘birds and bees’ or familiarising oneself with subversives. Nothing is taboo or classified anymore.

We end up with all-knowing teenagers who possess excellent nourishment and health due to science, hovering about like firecrackers with unlit fuses, ready to explode when the moment is right. 

This unsettling miniseries portrays a scenario in which two affluent neighbours, whose husbands are business partners, are also close friends. They share numerous similarities, both having teenage sons and each employing au pairs of Filipina heritage. 

One of the au pairs approached her neighbour's Madame to express her dissatisfaction with her employer. The Madame merely attempted to cut the conversation short, likely not wanting to jeopardise her friendship with the neighbour. The next day, the au pair goes missing. Everyone assumes she has merely run away from home. The police are called in. Things take a turn when the Madame begins to suspect that the husband may have had some involvement in her disappearance. A week later, her body is discovered floating in the lake.

Spoiler alert: As it turns out, one of the teenage sons had raped the Filipina. Feeling guilty and with no one to turn to, she took her own life. The trouble is that the youngster cannot be charged with rape. Legally, he is incapable of such an act. Forget that he is of Nordic stock, athletic, and a school wrestler. If anything, the deceased would be accused of sexual assault of the teenager! Probably because Filipinas are economically disadvantaged, occupy the lower strata of society, and are foreigners, the matter dies a natural death. Everyone moves on with their lives, nonetheless, dragging along huge burdens.

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Act your age!

Under Suspicion (2000)

Director: Stephen Hopkins

https://www.primevideo.com/-/tr/detail/Under-Suspicion/
0FJXXG5CM6WBS4GW9UT054Z0GW

This is another character-driven film featuring two Hollywood heavyweights, Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. The setting is straightforward. A prominent tax attorney is fully prepared to deliver an important speech at a fundraising event. He is called in for what was meant to be a brief questioning by the local police chief. However, the interview becomes increasingly convoluted. The tax attorney's personal life is laid bare and scrutinised. It becomes so intense that it drains both parties, and the questioning turns into an interrogation. The situation escalates to such a degree that the tax attorney is charged with the murder of two young prostitutes. 

His wife is called in for a separate interview, which further reveals intimate bedroom secrets and close family confidences. The tension escalates dramatically. The tax attorney ultimately confesses to murdering both young girls. Just then, a police officer barges in to announce that the real culprit was caught 'in the act'!

The thought that crossed my mind concerns self-realisation. There is a time and place for everything. Life opens a window of opportunity, but unfortunately, it remains open for only a short duration. We must seize it within that time frame, after which the same window may be closed to someone else. We are not welcome there. In fact, we are told it is utterly wrong.

The protagonist in this film had a healthy attraction to girls during his adolescent years. Perhaps due to his ambition to improve his economic situation or establish his career, romantic relationships were set aside. He dedicated all his efforts to advancing in his career and social standing. Life moved on around him. 

He suddenly cannot return to the dating scene years later and pick up where he left off, pursuing the same adolescent girl he had once been interested in. This is entirely wrong. The protagonist discovered this the hard way. As time passed, along with empowerment and education, things changed. 

One will be in big trouble if they don't act their age. Realise your age and realise that some kind of decorum is expected of you.

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An Indian serial killer

Por Thozhil (2023)

Director: Vignesh Raja

https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/tamil/por-
thozhil-trailer-sarath-kumar-ashok-selvan-starrer-
action-packed-gripping-thriller-8637264/

Thanks to SD for recommending this. SD is a childhood friend with a photographic memory for anything Bollywood when Bollywood was simply known as Hindi cinema. Back in school, during recess, he would attract an audience of friends who would listen as he belted out old Hindi songs and provided detailed backgrounds on the film's actors, music composers, release dates, and even the studios that produced the movies. Even now, he can still rattle off the same information after all these years. However, his interest came to a grinding halt in the 1980s when he felt that Bollywood had lost its charm. These days, SD is into Tamil and Malayalam cinema, which, he claims, are more interesting in storytelling.

 

This is a Tamil film that faithfully adheres to its intended genre. It is meant to be a thriller about a serial killer, and it remains true to its premise. It is not your usual Kollywood fare. There is romance, but it is barely developed. The songs are kept in the background, and there are certainly no item songs.

 

The film narrates the story of a series of murders involving young women who are killed similarly, with their hands tied back and their throats slit with a sharp object. After the local police struggle to make any progress, Logathan, a grumpy senior police officer, is called in to solve the case. A rookie officer, fresh out of the Police Academy with top marks, Prakash, is assigned as his deputy.

 

This sparks a little drama between the senior officer, who believes the young officers are worthless, and the newbie, who endeavours to impress his superior with his theoretical knowledge. The story unfolds slowly, with a solid build-up, before the potential killer is suddenly revealed to the audience. Sarath Babu, the darling of 1980s Tamil cinema, made his final appearance as a serial killer before passing away in the same year the movie was released. But wait for the twist at the end, hinting at a possible sequel.

 

Good show, 4.3/5.

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An interesting police drama!

Oru Nodi (Tamil, One Second, 2024)

Director: B Manivarman

https://www.jiosaavn.com/album/oru-nodi/9-Xa0ZWs2NU_

Even though the trailer depicts MS Bhaskar, the bald character actor who had graced many blockbusters recently, it was all a business gimmick. He only appears for a short while, and his character is killed off quite early in the movie, but he is shown in brief flashbacks. The rest of the film is completed by newbies and unfamiliar faces. Nevertheless, they all did a decent job. The story, however, could have been made more interesting. At one juncture, I wondered why the police were flip-flopping between one case and another as if they knew they were inter-related. 

To get the story straight, a forty-something lady shows up at a local police station to report her missing husband. Having watched so many police procedural dramas, one can guess what would follow. The lady is bombarded with wisecracks like he had run away from her torture or that he had gone on a drinking escapade. Just then, an inspector walks in to take charge. He gathers that the lady's husband, who went off with a large stash of cash to his debtors, could have been killed by a loan shark. 

In another scene, the body of a young lady is found dead along the village path. The plot twists when the autopsy confirms that she was in her early pregnancy. Police investigations suggest there was a stalker among her working colleagues who was quite determined to win her heart. But she had a boyfriend to complicate things. 

Meanwhile, the missing husband's mobile shows activity. The police spring into action. 

The rest of the police procedural drama has excellent narration. It is a cat-and-mouse story of clues, dead ends, new clues, and plot twists, leading to a finale that ties all the loose ends together. Not bad, not bad at all!

(P.S. Forget police brutality. When an Indian mentions that the police interrogated the suspect in their usual manner, it is a code that they beat the truth out of the victim. I thought this type of evidence had no legal standing!)

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Escaping the glance of Lady Justice?

Taxi Driver (Miniseries, S1E1-16; Korean; 2021)

With the wisdom proffered by age and experiences learned from the School of Hard Knocks, I am convinced that life is convoluted. Nothing one does is 100% right or good; conversely, not doing is not always wrong. If one can justify his actions and give convincing rhetoric, he can be considered a do-gooder. 

The miniseries is about this in sixteen episodes and more than 16 hours altogether. In the crooks-filled metropolitan city of Seoul, there is no shortage of murderers and serial killers. After the tedious process of investigating, collecting evidence and prosecuting, the victims and their relatives find that the courts are pretty docile. More often than not, the accused go scot-free. Sometimes, they get away with a slap on the wrist or technical issues. The feeling is that the perpetrators never feel the pain that the victims and their families endured. To add injury to insult, the wrongdoers mock the system, police and the accusers and carry on the things they do best with impunity. 

With increasingly intelligent lawyers with crooked minds to catch the obscure loophole in the law, more wrongdoers escape the glance of Lady Justice (because she is blindfolded?). Because law practitioners find better remuneration defending the accused than prosecuting them, the best ones bend over backwards to get them off the hook. Forensic sciences have improved by leaps and bounds, and so have the ways to create the element of doubt. The fear of punishing a single innocent person over letting a guilty person for free is always there. The need to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt is always the mantra.

Victims of serial killers get together to apprehend to mete their own brand of punishment under the guise of running a taxi company. To help out in their endeavour, they get the help of a local mafia lady boss. Hot on their trail is a young prosecutor who senses something fishy going on under the hood of the taxi company.

The season tackles many societal issues that often go unnoticed. A mentally challenged lady is abused at a factory that was supposedly set up for the specially-abled. The culture of workplace bullying to achieve better sales hits the roof when someone is beaten up. A high school boy is bullied because he is poor. The protagonist of the show, an ex-army, had his mother killed by a mad killer and has set his life mission to save victims of the evil elements of society. He passes his name card to the person he thinks needs his help. In this vigilante group are the CEO of an NGO, a hacker and two mechanics.

In the later episodes, the vigilante group realise that they have been cheated by the Mafia, who opt to monetise the prisoners by harvesting their organs! A three-cornered pursuit starts, with the police and public prosecutor's office on one side, the other being the Mafia and the vigilante group.

Playing by the book may not be the best; neither is taking the law into your own hands. What if the situation and circumstances squarely put the wrong person as guilty? It happened in this miniseries. A man was wrongly jailed for 20 years only to be released later after the real killer confessed. Who will return the 20 years of loss of respect, job, love, family life, seeing the world change, and living the one life he had been sent to Earth for?

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Police, leave them people alone?!

Naalu Policeum Nalla Irundha Oorum (4 Policemen and a peaceful town, Tamil; 2015)

Directed by N. J. Srikrishna

This full-length comedy came and went without creating much of a storm. Naturally, it received little rave review. All the actors were very green, except for Yogi Babu, who did not play a vital role here, anyway.

The story is a comedy of errors, poking fun at how the police's assertion of their importance screws up the peace of an already peaceful village.

The small township of Porpandhal is so peaceful that it has received Best Village awards for years. There is no crime, and the police station sees no need to open on Sunday. The four policemen there lead cushy lives, working from 9 to 5 and playing board games all day.

The police HQ takes notice. It plans to shut down the station and transfer its staff to Ramnath, an area notorious for serious crimes. The policemen panic. They try to justify their presence by creating petty issues here and there.

Little did they expect what would finally pander with their little tweaking. They send out a petty thief to steal the village committee's collection monies, making the police appear as heroes when they retrieve the loot later. They hoped this would prevent the police station from closing and allow them to maintain their leisurely lives.

Unfortunately. the money that the thief stole got burnt in a fire. The committee chairman accuses the shopkeeper whose shop was razed by fire as the thief and of lying by purposely burning down his shop to hide evidence.

When the police tried to intervene by making the temple priests as mediators, a stash of dirty magazines was found planted in the temple grounds instead, angering the temple committee members. They, too, go ballistic against the rest of the villagers.

At the end of the day, the once exemplary peaceful village now becomes a war zone. Everyone ends up in arms against one another. The policemen, though, get their wishes fulfilled. They stay put.

Everyone is trying to prove their worth. A doctor is worth his degree only if people fall sick. A mechanic will be out of a job if everyone's vehicle is maintenance-free and immune from breakdowns. In the same way, lawyers will be jobless if no one runs afoul of the law. Lawyers may also turn a non-issue into a national crisis; leave it to them. The same goes for the police, too; so much power and nowhere to flaunt it can be pretty intimidating.

Respect is earned. People are free to respect each other if they think their existence is respected. Try greeting a random guy on the street. Invariably, he would reciprocate your salutations unless he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia or believes there is a catch.

The moment the other party thinks that he is taken for a fool and feels cheated or discriminated against, that is when all human decencies end. The experiment was done by a third-grade school teacher, Jane Elliott, in 1968 after Martin Luther King's assassination highlighted this effect. She wanted to show how it felt to be discriminated against. The all-white class was divided into two groups- the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed. The blue-eyed students were given preferential treatment and compliments. The experiment was reversed but only lasted two days. From the short experiment, she found how easily people deemed 'inferior' fitted into the role so quickly and saw how fast the mild-mannered students in the 'superior' 'group became devils.

The lesson learnt here is that everything is honky dory when each other's liberty is respected. He flips when one's position is threatened or feels he is taken for a pushover. The suppressed reptilian mind awakens, and like Pandora's Box, evil thoughts and actions will be unleashed. All shields will be up to ward off anything that resembles hostility. The societal-imposed social inhibitions go out of the window!

May not! The Wokes and BLM sympathisers seem to scream from the depths of their lungs to de-fund the police. They argue that having a police squad is damaging to the existence of the minorities in the country. Alternative? Let looters have a field day, businesses finding it not cost-effective to apprehend or persecute offenders with minor thefts or simply close their retail stores and opt for online businesses only. 

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google.com, pub-8936739298367050, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

Corrupted to the core?

Nile Hilton Incident (Arabic/Egyptian; 2017)
Written/Directed: Tarik Saleh

Every time a new law comes into force, guess who the happy people are. No, not the law-abiding citizens or the patriots who want to see rule and order respected in this country. It is the lowly local enforcers - the front-liners who are there to ensure that the law is respected. There are the first to detect any wrongdoing at the ground level and could squash a ticket, at a nominal fee, of course. 

Everyone is happy. The poorly paid constables and local council employees get on by tying up loose ends - maybe a child's birthday present or that emergency trip to the hometown. 

The problem is that this kind of 'closing an eye' or 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine' attitude has infiltrated all strata of the civil service. What we see now are the accusations of so-and-so of the higher pecking order being charged for siphoning off funds and dishonestly performing their civil duties. Invariably, these events will merely turn up to be a storm in a teacup.

Fearing a backlash to the whole government machinery, the powers-that-be would hush everything. After all, the foxes appointed to guard the coop feel it is the ordained right to benefit from their post after years of hard work and sacrifice. With the increasing cost of living and exposure to the high life, they have only a few more years to ensure continued prosperity in their retired life and their offspring. Whatever is said and done, the rot is across the board. The words integrity, efficiency and civil service cannot be strung in the same sentence.

If we remember the early years of the 21st century in the Middle East, this catalysed the Arab Spring movement. What started as a jobless graduate failing to secure a hawker site in Libya and immolating himself in protest, the governments raised up to get their acts together. So, for a short while, at least.

In Egypt, in 2011, in Tahrir Square specifically, the people's power managed to oust Hosni Mubarak, the undisputed strongman of Egypt. Using this event as a build to the climax, this film showcases the widespread corruption and culture of protecting the high-heeled and politicians in the law enforcement units in Egypt.

Noredin, a police officer obviously not at the highest of the virtue scale, is called to investigate the death of a singer at Nile Hilton. Noredin has no qualms about pocketing extra cash from his dead victims and looking the other way if offenders are willing to dole out a little spare money. 

Slowly he realises that the whole force is corrupt to the core. Many of his superiors are on the take. Many high-level politicians are linked to the crime he is investigating, and he is helpless in completing his investigations. Vice is widespread, and pimps are kings. 

A Sudanese housekeeping assistant who witnessed the murder, meanwhile, is on the run from the corrupt police and colluding thugs. The film climaxes at the Tahrir Square demonstrations. The whole debacle leaves a horrible aftertaste. The demonstration gives the image as if all the slime brewing in the trenches just bubbles over.

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Pay for the sins of their fathers?

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia 

(Turkish, Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da; 2011)

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Imagine standing out on a hill in the wild on a dark moonless night. You notice a row of moving lights. From its movement, you can guess that it is a moving train. You cannot imagine where it came from and where it is going. Soon you get a complete cacophony of sounds, the chugging of its engine, the bellowing of its high-pitched whistle that pierces the silence of the night and its belching of smoke. When it is nearer, you watch it intently, swerving and crawling. All your pleasant memories of your train travel flash right before you. As the train rapidly manifests, the stream of trains disappears behind the mountains equally swiftly right under your watch. You are left wondering what happened to the passengers, staff and the train itself. What baggage does each of them carry? What bitter-sweet experiences did each of them live to tell?

This one exciting movie defines what cinematography is all about. The creative use of light and darkness, long shorts and tight shorts and whatever it takes to give a memorable, long-lasting impression of the movie. Even a blurred view from a frosted glass appears so poetic.

The story is phenomenal. It is a simple story with no heroes. Everybody is a nobody with only one mission in their mind. Everybody is in a hurry to finish their work and return to their respective lives, which may not be hunky-dory. It is their responsibility to do what they have to do as how their fathers did in their jobs and family lives. Sometimes in their careers, they ask themselves what they are actually doing in their day to day, their actions and inactions in a rather philosophical way. 

Three cars are seen moving in the cloak of darkness at the edge of a district in Anatolia. It is the wild country where might speaks louder than compassion and logic. Animals and even people fight to survive. Violence is expressed to prove a point. The cars carry some police personnel, a doctor, a prosecutor, a couple of general workers, an army man and a pair of brothers who confessed to a murder. The team is out there to retrieve the dead body.

The elder of the two brothers cannot pinpoint exactly where he dumped his victim as he was inebriated during the crime. They go on a wild goose chase, to which the overworked policemen put their frustrations on the convicts by giving them a good beating.

Slowly, the background of the characters comes to the fore. 

The investigating police officer must juggle between his never-ending job and managing his chronically ill son.

The doctor is a divorcee after 2 years of marriage. Obviously, he still misses her. The reason for their break-up is not revealed. Though he is a pacifist, he is caught with the band of the rough company at work. 

The only person who can keep all the men under control is the prosecutor. He uses his charm and experience dealing with criminals to rein them in. His intellect makes him able to converse with the doctor.

The prosecutor tells of a peculiar case where a lady predicted her exact date of death; five months after her delivery. It turns out to be his wife, we are told later. She was assumed to have had a heart attack, and that was it - an unprecedented unexplainable power to predict her own's death. When the doctor prodded further to suggest whether suicide was ever considered a possibility, the prosecutor laughed it off. Then it dawned upon him. The prosecutor was engaged in a short fling when his wife was pregnant. It was discovered by his wife, and the doctor proposed that she could have taken her own life after delivering at the same time punishing her husband. It all made sense to the prosecutor as digoxin was available in their household. Her father took digoxin for a heart ailment. 

The entourage stops for a rest at a local mayor's bungalow. Here, we are told that the mayor's biggest problem is not having a morgue to store dead bodies so that the deceased's family from overseas can visit before the burial. Talk about priority when frequent blackouts are not a big problem. How can maintain a mortuary without electricity?

In one scene, the mayor's angelic-looking daughter brings in tea. She mesmerises everyone with her beauty. The agitated men with only one thing on their minds suddenly swayed away. Are the storytellers suggesting that the presence of females is distracting men from their purposes in their lives?

The doctor faces a dilemma when the body is eventually found, and the postmortem is completed. The body was probably buried alive - earth was found in the trachea, not killed before concealing the body. If the cause of death was written as asphyxia, not a fractured skull, as was also found, it would just prolong the anger. The victim's son would avenge his father's death. The doctor thought we should bury the truth. Was he doing the right thing or doing a disservice? We are left to wonder?

The final take-home message must surely be this. We are the by-products of our father's actions. Subsequently, our progenies prosper or suffer because of our actions or inactions. Now, the question is, who is out there keeping count of our merits and demerit points and executing what is due to us?

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