‘Stephen’ movie review: An inventive climax reinvents the serial-killer archetype in this middling film

Just as you began to wonder whether psychopaths on film have reached their saturation point, here comes Stephen, a Tamil serial killer film on Netflix, that reminds us that deep within the cracks of the human psyche lie doors to unimaginable possibilities, with which a screenwriter can always manage to have some fun.

When you first meet Stephen Jebaraj (played by Gomathi Shankar), he comes across as a normal everyman you might sit next to on a public bus — quite like how the film itself appeared; we all wondered why a streaming platform still finding its form in southern India greenlit a film featuring a predominantly newcomer cast and crew. But if infamous serial killers and the innumerable underdog blockbusters made on them have proved anything, it is that looks can be deceiving. And that the deadliest of them all appear as harmless as you can imagine.

Gomathi Shankar as Stephen Jebaraj in ‘Stephen’
| Photo Credit:
Arunachaleswaran \ Netflix

Stephen spends much of its two-hour runtime appearing as a run-of-the-mill psychopath story about a man who surrenders to the police after murdering nine women, whom he lured to his house on the pretext of offering acting opportunities. Even in its production, the film appears quite amateurish, playing all the keys of a forgettable melody. We are taken through a routine serial-killer backstory of how Stephen suffered mommy and daddy issues in his childhood.

Now, while the writing of the pathos itself may not entice you enough, the early signs of what is to come are how meticulously the film draws out the trauma Stephen suffered at the hands of his devilish parents. Even his monstrous father — an alcoholic P.T.E. teacher who kills his son’s puppy and beats his wife — gets dwarfed when his mother, a bakery owner, says enough is enough and takes matters into her own hands, only for it to become much more abusive to a young Stephen. An imagery likens this abusive power struggle to a perennial Ferris wheel, cyclical and helpless for someone stuck in the middle.

Where things change for Stephen is when the investigators after him — Michael Thangadurai, playing a cop sharing his name, and Seema (Smruthi Venkat), a criminal psychologist who has taken an interest in Stephen’s case — ponder over the possibility of a third character in Stephen’s past.

Usually, when such a scenario arises, audiences tend to start playing a guessing game. Umpteen films have told us that the possibilities are of two kinds: the mystery character is either someone we have already seen in the film, or it is an all-new character with their own backstory. The film sticks with one of the two, but adds just the right number of subversions to make you sit right up.

For instance, in one moment, Michael calls someone’s name, and they turn. He then urges them to stay safe. The reason for this move is so banal that you begin to wonder if Michael was double-checking if the said person was who they said they were.

In one pivotal scene, Seema mentions how Stephen is a pathological liar who seems to have a more violent psyche than what he lets the cops believe. While anyone familiar with the genre will guess that Stephen will become an unreliable narrator, nothing truly prepares you for the climax sequence. Interestingly enough, the way the mystery character’s arc moves to the climax makes Stephen stand apart from other similar attempts in Tamil cinema.

Michael Thangadurai as Michael Thangadurai, Smruthi Venkat as Seema in ‘Stephen’
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy of Netflix

You begin to wonder what you would do if you were in that situation with someone like Stephen, and the brilliance in the script comes to the fore when the writer makes even the audience empathise with Stephen. Even you, the audience, will begin to double-check if you are in your senses, and that is why the film must expectably build its own audience.

However, the burden of its existence is that audiences must feel compelled to sit till the final act for the exercise to become anything worthwhile, and Stephen fumbles as it never feels like a pulsating crescendo reaching its peak. Neither the music composition nor the sound nor the camera builds an atmosphere capable of such vision, and the camera captures actors trying to be actors in an air that screams pretentious. Only Smruthi, Gomathi Shankar, and Vijayashree, who plays Stephen’s mother, appear capable of bringing their characters to life.

In the hands of a tighter filmmaker and editor, and provided it built its own language to achieve its storytelling ambitions, Stephen could have become a great character study of a psychopath. And given how the film ends, one must hope that director Mithun will achieve that potential in his next.

Stephen is currently streaming on Netflix

Published – December 05, 2025 01:31 pm IST