Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar

It may be one of cinema’s greatest tricks that it can twist one’s line of thinking about a person or an incident just with the perspective it chooses to present, the framing, editing choices, or the background score used. Reading a basic news report on the incident of crime at the centre of Shahad’s Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar might make one assume a particular stand on the culprits, knowing the long history of this kind of crime in the country and the stories that can be made up to save them. However, the film frames the incident, the events leading up to it, its aftermath and the people involved in such a way that not once do we wish for the culprits to be caught and punished. Of course, we have Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam (2013), in which we all collectively stood with those who committed the crime. The film also has quite a few parallels with Drishyam, but this one has very different concerns and approach to the crime.

The first few scenes of Shahad Nilambur’s Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar remind one of Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, in how undramatically we find out about the death of Aleena Abraham’s (Parvathy Thiruvothu) husband on duty. Aleena, with a child and the hopes of her husband’s family pinned on her, takes the police job on offer. There are no theatrics, no sad ballads or wave of sympathy for her, her baby or her situation. Theatrics is for later, but manufacturing sympathy almost never enters the picture, for Aleena is cut from a different cloth. The film then speedruns—a montage covers her training, a split-second encounter with her husband’s former colleague, her posting to a station in Kottayam and getting comfortable with the new workplace and her sufficiently leisurely colleagues, all of them in the lowest rungs of the police hierarchy. We realize that time has passed and the baby is now a toddler.

How do we empathise with a force like the police? The last time I asked myself this, I was watching reels of police violence against Gen-Z protesters at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. That scepticism lasted about thirty minutes, right until I spotted a traffic cop drenched in sweat while I sat comfortably in an AC vehicle, wearing sunglasses and two layers of sunscreen. Humanising lower-rank police officers in India is an uncomfortable exercise. Director Shahad’s investigative thriller Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar takes up that challenge and builds a cat-and-mouse game around a group of cops hiding an accidental crime from a system that both empowers and oppresses them.

An accidental death occurs. The body has to be disposed of. Every trace of evidence has to be erased. The investigators have to be outsmarted. The truth has to be concealed forever. No, we are not talking about Drishyam here. But such has been the impact. It’s a benchmark in such thriller narratives, and lately there has been a surge in different iterations of this crime-cover-up trope in many languages. Maa Behen (Hindi), Kuttram Purindhavan and Blast (Tamil), Mohiniyattam (Malayalam)… On the surface, Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (PDK) has a similar premise. Something ghastly happens, and this time around, the duel is between cops themselves. Four low-ranked ordinary cops vs a veteran officer with an unblemished track record. The result is a gripping police procedural thriller that’s cleverly written, packed with tension and twists, and never takes the audience for granted.

In a film titled Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (prima facie culprits), you’d wonder why its writers spend so much time introducing the police officers. When we first meet Aleena (Parvathy), we’re told that she has lost her husband and that she’s being given his job in the police force on compassionate grounds. She has a baby girl, and it appears that she has no one else to live for except her daughter. In the new station where she takes charge, we also meet Divya (Unnimaya), a senior constable who hasn’t yet been able to conceive a child despite multiple attempts. As for Dasan (Siddharth Bharathan) and Sreenath (Mathew), both of them are on the cusp of starting their respective lives after years of waiting. Everything about these officers and their police station spells out their ordinariness. We catch them picking fights with the egoistic senior officer, and we see them going through their mundane duties without the righteousness of the kind police officers movies are made with. But this is only until these fallible officers collude to make a mistake that’s bigger than all of them. By this point, though, these four have become very real people in our minds, and even their wrongs begin to look a lot like muddy truths to us.