Written & Directed by: Sachy
Starring: Prithviraj Sukumaran, Biju Menon
Available on Amazon Prime Video.
This film has a simple plot, it's a tiff between two men; one is Koshy Kurien played by Prithviraj Sukumaran who has a lot of influence and the other is Ayyappan Nair, a cop. Circumstances put them opposite each other once and from there each of them keeps doing a tit for tat to the other in a loop. The film is 3 hours long and it never feels boring, it isn't a slice of life film where we see a character going through many phases in life or it isn't a film with a lot of plot twists and turns, it has a simple premise and it's just because of the brilliant writing and filmmaking that it works. The world of the film, the socio-cultural milieu is established very well. The landscapes, the costumes, the people's perspective on a lot of things are clearly captured. Both the characters are written in a way that they're consistent throughout the film, especially Ayyappan Nair. He's a cop and we have a certain image of him, but when we know that he was a guy who killed a lot of people in the past and the people say that he's like a bull and the police uniform is what tames him, we don't see a different Ayyappan Nair there, we don't see different body language or a drastically different performance. We see the same person, but just our perspective of the person changes.
Prithviraj Sukumaran does a good job, his hair, make up and costumes play a huge role in the depiction of his character, mainly his sense of pride and masculinity. The film deals with the themes of masculinity, revenge, ego and how men deal with these. The core themes raised in the film and the way they're dealed is similar to Karthik Subbaraj's Iraivi, that's a more dark film because we see people dying and lives getting ruined there but here we see it on a lighter note, like the saying 'men will be men'. It's interesting to see how these men won't even let the other person go to jail and suffer, and how they want to kill the other person with their own strength. They've good spirit, they won't punch below each other's belts. It's like rivarly in a boxing match. They go to each other's houses but don't harm their women and children. Each of them feels like a warrior with honesty and integrity. This is what I liked about the film, it's at a grey zone. It's not Lord Ram or Ted Bundy all the time, there are billions of people between them or some even beyond them and cinema helps us meet a lot of these people.
The music by Jakes Bejoy is so minimalist in some scenes, it doesn't even feel like music. He uses simple sounds and sound effects to create drama in the scene and that's my favorite style of creating drama. You don't need an orchestra playing all the time, in every scene that you see. The look of the film is also consistent, it has a certain look in the police station and a certain look in the landscape of the outdoors. The pacing of the film is similar to most of the Netflix originals, where we can watch the story in a laid back way and yet it isn't boring by any means.
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