Mirage review: Jeethu Joseph’s latest film is all twists, but very few thrills

Mirage (Malayalam)

Jeethu Joseph’s Mirage , starring Asif Ali and Aparna Balamurali, is one of those thrillers that keeps tossing surprises at you. Except most of them aren’t very surprising.

At its core, the story has the right ingredients — mystery, suspicion, and characters who all seem to be hiding something. A man vanishes, a death raises questions, and secrets slowly tumble out. But the film spends too little time building its characters, leaving us with people we don’t know well enough to care about. Instead, the narrative leans on red herrings to keep the audience guessing — devices that neither deepen the story nor pay off in any meaningful way. So when the big shifts finally arrive, they land without much weight.

To its credit, the opening stretch, where we grapple with Haki