I, Nobody

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.

The world always teaches you that you are a nobody in the larger scheme of things. Prithviraj Sukumaran and Parvathy’s I, Nobody explores a similar theme, but goes one step ahead to ask a much-needed question: What does a nobody have to do to get justice? In one of the film’s crucial scenes, a police official explains to Prithviraj’s Rajeevan the concept of the food chain – but with a twist. The grasshopper, at the bottom of the pyramid, should not just eat grass. It should eat the frog that preys on it. That’s how cut-throat the world is.

Noted film critic Pauline Kael, writing in the early 1970s, argued, “Movies are good at action; they’re not good at reflective thought or conceptual thinking”. A contestable claim, though it might be something director Nissam Basheer resonates with deeply. His films scramble timelines, introduce characters with breathless intention, and jerk into action with a density of information. There is hardly time to step back and take stock of the debris of information—the aftermath. In Rorschach (2022), with a mourning widower (Mammootty) trying to avenge his wife’s murder, it served Basheer well. The relentless unspooling of the film began to feel like a puzzle falling into place—intentions clarified, backstories unclouded, villainy and heroism solidified. In I, Nobody, however, it hollows the film out till it becomes a shell of itself—all rage, no respite. Fatally, the film is spun around a character, without bothering to ask or answer—who is this Rajeevan (Prithviraj Sukumaran)?

It’s disappointing, or rather disheartening, to see films that are promising enough to be game-changers succumb to the ‘second half curse’ that’s been plaguing our mainstream cinema for a while now. i, Nobody is the latest entrant to this unfortunate club of films that take off to soaring heights only to come crashing down by the end. But on a positive note, this is not a film that runs out of ideas; it’s pregnant with potential even when the wheels start coming off. It simply crumbles under the weight of its ambitions.