‘Scene’ movie review: Suriya redefines mass in Jithu Madhavan’s ‘scene’-tillating dark comedy

A group of young women waver between picking up their bags from the theatre’s baggage counter and watching the film again before the excitement mellows. This is a ‘scene’ I witnessed on Deepavali day today, after watching an early-morning screening of Suriya’s Scene — a Deepavali release that feels like a film version of watching a 10000-wala firecracker burst with timed perfection.

Directed by Aavesham-maker Jithu Madhavan, Scene is an engaging and entertaining dark comedy with so much going for it that choosing its most satisfying highlight is a difficult exercise. Let’s start with Suriya, for whom this will undoubtedly be a hat-trick of hits in 2026.

With a career spanning almost 30 years, Suriya has ‘scene’ it all (all puns in this review are intentional). In fact, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say he’s one of those rare stars who can shift gears, experiment if he wants, or choose less-risky mass entertainers, and still win over his audience more often than not.

His offbeat Retroended with mixed results, but it seems to have hardly stopped the experimentalist in him — with Scene, he finds in Jithu Madhavan a filmmaker who understands ‘mass’ on a refreshingly cerebral level. If Nelson recalibrated Superstar Rajinikanth for modern audiences in Jailer 2, Jithu Madhavan finds a satisfying unison between Suriya’s abilities as a superstar and a performer who vanishes into the story.

There’s a moment in Scene when Suriya, playing police officer Inbaraj, breaks the fourth wall and asks, “Who is that Suriya? Is he some big shot?” On paper, you might mistake this for the routine meta-ness we are accustomed to in modern star vehicles, but this is where Jithu changes the scene.

Suriya, the star, becomes the butt of the joke, fodder for Inbaraj, the protagonist of Scene. Even his famous ‘Ondra ton weight’ punchline from Singam (2010)comes with a comical twist. Here, Jithu wishes to rewrite ‘mass.’ The real star is no longer Suriya, but the film’s exquisite form.

From the word go, Jithu plays around with conventional rules. Annoyed that his boss Stephen (Lal) refuses to accept his resignation, Inbaraj goes about his life as an overachiever bored with success. He has cracked umpteen high-profile cases without breaking much sweat, including the sensational case of the notorious Perfume Killer.

Inba smokes like a chimney, wears the same home clothes to the office, and behaves like a cynical, unsociable know-it-all. “He has gotten so lazy that he doesn’t even enter the crime scene, instead asking his subordinates to do the dirty work or recite the case sheet repeatedly,” one subordinate complains.

Jithu floods these introductory sequences with his trademark eccentricities, but quickly pulls the rug out from under your feet with a reveal about a specific condition Inba suffers from. It’s not something you wouldn’t see coming (clear-sighted audiences might find ample visual clues), but the character design is worked around quite cleverly — like, for instance, the detail of why a smartphone is so important to Inba that he has it hanging around him on a sleeve.

By the time Inba’s fascinating world unfolds, and the film unravels the arc of a truly intriguing protagonist, writer Jithu would have already piqued your interest with Eeswaran (Naslen), a stone-cold serial killer who has temporarily adopted the modus operandi of the Perfume Killer for the sake of his ‘business.’ Eeswaran approaches killing with a procedural indifference, calling it a business like no other.

One daunting dialogue — about how everyone would have wished to kill someone at one point in their lives — has him infect his evil and almost incriminate the viewer. If Inba is methodical and prepared, Eeswaran is vigilant and preemptive.

With such a hero and villain in sight, Jithu comfortably manoeuvres through the first half. Scenes in Scene flow so seamlessly that even when a lot happens on screen, you hardly realise the passage of time. Crisp shot division and effective editing (kudos to Ajmal Sabu) — and cinematographer Vineeth Augustian’s stylishly conceived shots and sparing but effective slow-motions — ensure the 149-minute Scene moves like butter.

Populating Inba’s world with colourful characters and humour distracts you from the fact that Inba’s and Eeswaran’s arcs don’t meet for a very long time. Jithu’s trademark dark humour, which we saw in glorious form in his previous two films, Romancham and Aavesham, once again becomes Scene’s biggest highlight.

After the first half of Jailer 2, Scene is easily one of the most hilarious films, with a high joke-to-second ratio. From a line a henchman utters to his boss in a graveyard to how a ‘mass-y’ scene featuring Inba in a rolling chair ends, even a window of a few seconds gets a joke or two to leave you in splits.

Watch out, this ‘meme godown’ is set to take over social media very soon! Scene shifts gear once more with the arrival of Iridayaraj (Anandraj in a surprising turn), Inba’s father, and Selvi, Inba’s mother. In Romancham and Aavesham, Jithu explored the idea of a found family, with the boys and men living far from home building life-affirming bonds with each other.

This hilariously extends to Scene; even though Iridayaraj and Selvi are Inba’s parents, the three come across like incompatible colleagues who are forced to work together. Along with Maya (welcome back, Nazriya), these four become a ragtag team of misfits hunting Eeswaran— a woman with a neuropsychological issue, a man with a specific sensory condition, a serial profiler with a drinking problem, and a former forensic surgeon with short-term memory loss.

That said, the film’s emotional core lies in the relationship between Inba and Maya — a sensitive idea that Jithu handles with care. Maya becomes the third eye through which Inba perceives the world, but she also becomes the missing piece of a puzzle he didn’t know he needed.

Props to Jithu for weaving this into the film’s narrative and letting Maya become the Jarvis...