Vikrant Rona could have been a great thriller. But it falls quite short. Set design, art direction, cinematography, and of course, Sudeep's acting are all pretty brilliant. The main core of the story is also not bad. Where it fails is in the execution.
We get to revisit Kamarottu again. You will be pumped up at the beginning. But then it devolves pretty quickly. The climax is much better than the rest of the movie though.
The things that went wrong with the movie are-
1) Romance: This kills the movie singlehandedly. It's slow, uninteresting, too long, bores the heck out of you by killing the main story's momentum a thousand times.
2) Songs: They are ok-ish, but every one of them feels out of place and unnecessary.
3) The movie's characters and their mannerisms are hyper-urban and their conversations use too much of fine English/Hindi for a story set in the middle of a place like Kamarottu. I hated this in Rangitharanga and hated it even more in VR. (Sudeep/Anup can learn a thing or two on this aspect by watching movies of Rakshith/Rishabh/Raj Shetty.)
4) One of the climax's big reveals can be seen right away in the beginning. The director's attempts to hide it becomes annoyingly way too obvious.
5) The small things that further degrade the movie are the cheap jump scares, terrible jokes, cliched horror-movie scenes, forgettable dialogues, poor acting by Nirup Bhandari, and too much of melodrama.
Despite all these negatives, the movie has some great moments, and they show the potential of the director. I hope he does a better job in his future ventures.
