Recommended
It’s a solid backbone for a thriller — except that Athithi, after a while, abandons this angle and drifts into a more personal zone. These latter portions aren’t bad — our sympathies shift slowly, and there’s a good scene with a sex worker — though to get there we have to wade through Thambi Ramaiah’s tone-deaf comedy track and a generally underwhelming cast. The bigger problem with Athithi, which is directed by Bharathan, is that the writing is all over the place. You know how desperate a film is when we see a man lurking in the dark, with a knife in his hand and a jangling music score behind, and it turns out he’s bought his wife a birthday cake.