S. R. Praveen

Rarely have we seen an actor’s name attached to the film’s name. The CBFC certificate for Thudakkam, directed by Judy Anthany Joseph, displays the film’s name as ‘Vismaya Mohanlal’s Thudakkam’, heralding the debut film of actor Mohanlal’s daughter. Mohanlal appears in a cameo role as a martial arts master and tells Meenu (Vismaya) that this is her ‘Thudakkam’ (beginning) and to “make your father proud”. Though Sai Kumar plays her father in the film, what is implied is not lost on anyone.

Just like Vicky (Neeraj Madhav), the protagonist of the sci-fi comedy Pluto, who befriends an alien, the movie also does not know what exactly to do with the alien character. This has to do with the nature of the alien. In an attempt to break alien stereotypes, Pluto does not have superpowers, except for two skills which are only sparingly used. So, there are only so many exciting things left for the alien to do. Probably due to tight budgets, the alien also lacks elaborate design elements. Just a spandex suit with a human face (Althaf Salim) does the job. By extension, this would mean that the alien would do familiar Althaf Salim things. One interesting touch that screenwriter Niyas Muhammed and filmmaker Adithyan Chandrasekhar bring to the table is the similarity between Vicky and Pluto, the alien. Both are considered losers in life. Hence, Pluto cannot be of particular use to Vicky, who is down and out after failing with one ill-advised business idea after another.

One can sense self-indulgence in the air when a police officer-turned-successful screenwriter writes a film about a policeman struggling to enter the film industry as a scriptwriter, incorporating the uncommon tales that he encountered in service. Shahi Kabir, one of the early players in this peculiar phenomenon of police officers-turned-screenwriters that has swept Malayalam cinema, does not serve a straight-up procedural this time around in Unmadham.

Varavu is the kind of film that gives one the feeling that the action sequences were probably planned out first, with an excuse of a storyline added later. Well, there should be a reason for the fights. Can there be a better reason than a good old revenge story of 1990s vintage set in the high ranges? The film is too eager to showcase its fights that by the time we get to know even the name of the protagonist, Paulson (Joju George), two long fight sequences are over.

How far would a fallen man go for redemption? If one were to ask Rajeevan (Prithviraj Sukumaran), the protagonist of Nissam Basheer’s, I, Nobody, he would probably say: from one extreme, reckless act to another. Consequently, the film also takes one on a rollercoaster series of events, which are intriguing and unconventional up to a point until they turn chaotic misfires. For that matter, almost every other character in I, Nobody appears to believe that their redemption arc lies in jumping into an even bigger problem than the one which they are already entangled in, almost as if they gained some pleasure from further tightening the noose around their neck. These are the kind of men who would bring an earth mover to pick a dry leaf which had fallen on their front yard. But then, we need people like that to create uncommon cinematic situations, which are aplenty in I, Nobody.

One of the highly charged sequences in Ananthan Kaadu, directed by Jiyen Krishnakumar and written by Murali Gopy, happens inside a college campus in Thiruvananthapuram in the early 1990s. This “mass” scene featuring the screenwriter himself in a highly imaginary scenario, hardly has any connection with the main plot, almost as if it accidentally got mixed into this film from the edits of some other film. Its only intention appears to be to inject some regressive political points into the narrative. This particular sequence might not be surprising for those who have watched Tiyaan (2017), the previous team-up of Jiyen Krishnakumar and Murali Gopy, which had its share of regressive politics packaged in the garb of a progressive film.

A minor act of revolt can be your undoing in the film industry, where power centres are not very tolerant of those who do not fall in line. Vineeth Madhavan (Naslen), the filmmaker protagonist of Mollywood Times, goes the whole hog in his attempt to make his first film without any compromises, a film he wants to be remembered forever. In the process, we see his worldview transform from optimistic to cynical. Scene after scene seethes with the anger and frustration of someone who experiences his dream slipping away from grasp for no fault of his, so much so that one begins to wonder how much of the events in the film have been drawn from the life of its filmmaker, Abhinav Sunder Nayak. At least, much of the cynicism of his superb debut film, Mukundan Unni Associates, is very much visible here too.

One can sit through something as intolerable as Kattalan only if one can invent some distraction. A possible diversion could be to keep a count of the humans and elephants killed during the film’s two-hour duration. But halfway through, you are bound to lose track as the killings are just too many, even in a single sequence, to get an accurate number. In the end, one realises that the biggest casualty of this relentless assault on the senses is neither humans nor elephants, but cinema itself. The dishonesty of it all is evident in how it treats its characters. To fill the emotional void at the centre of the film, one or two characters, like a physically challenged young girl, are introduced randomly and immediately turned into victims of some violent act, which would then set off some pathos-inducing background score. The writers are clearly not interested in these characters. They are deliberately using them for the film’s emotional impact and to underscore the need for revenge.