A man haunted by his past romance gets a second chance at love when a girl breezes into his life like sunshine. But when his old flame resurfaces, will he cling to his past, or hold on to his present?
Shuffling between the naive optimism of a Gautham Menon film and an ultra-messy Mani Ratnam romance, this is a neatly narrated and ably performed ‘whodunnit’ about a man, the person who killed him and the one who brought him back alive.
To call Once More an intense love story would be to reduce it to just one aspect that makes this film wonderfully frustrating. Instead, one would prefer to look at this story of a man named Raghuvaran (Arjun Das) as something of a cruel whodunnit. I call it that because the Raghu we’re first introduced to can barely be called a person who is well and alive. He’s a corpse that’s just about capable of walking and talking. When we see him in constant conversation with both a priest as well as a psychiatrist, we see him grappling with spirituality and/or science to bring him alive. Instead of saying ‘Raghu is…’, the film trains you to say ‘Raghu was…’
It’s to this nothingness that we see the entry of Anjali (Aditi Shankar). If Raghu is lifeless, Anjali is full of life, perhaps to an alarming extent. She knows the effect she has on people around her and before we get there, she’s the first to call herself a version of Genelia from Santhosh Subramaniam. She’s also aware that she may be perceived as someone who is out to “save” a person like Raghu, recognising her own saviour complex before we get there too.
Arjun Das is indistinguishable as the two Raghuvarans in one of his most sincere roles yet. He pulls off the grump just as well as the happy lover boy. Aditi too is just as good, finding a new way to play a character that comes with easy comparisons.
The title of Vignesh Srikanth’s Once More seems apt not just because it’s about a man haunted by his past romance getting a second chance, but also because the film itself is a retelling of a familiar premise — one we’ve seen in films like Autograph, Premam and Hridayam
Once More is a classic case of strong foundation with a shaky follow-up. With a promising start of love knocking on the doors again, some good music and scenes that could easily be labelled cringey (romance can be cringey and it’s fine), the film loses steam when it forays into Raghu’s elaborate but broad-stroked flashback. Thereafter, the narrative wears a weak conflict to arrive at a ‘feel-good’ ending.
