Subscribe
Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (Malayalam)
It is almost always unsettling to watch a police officer try to get away with a crime. They know the law, they know how an investigation works, and, crucially, they know what investigators look for. In Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar, that knowledge becomes both an advantage and a liability for a team of four relatively junior officers.
Set against a custodial death at the Nattakom police station in Kottayam, the film directed by Shahad begins as a police thriller but gradually becomes a tense moral and psychological game between people on either side of the law. At the centre of it is Aleena Abraham (Parvathy Thiruvothu), a constable who joined the force through compassionate appointment after the death of her husband Abraham. And what begins as an ordinary day at the station soon leaves Aleena and her colleagues grappling with a situation that could destroy their lives and careers.
The film does something interesting with this premise. It does not make the crime itself easy to swallow, nor does it pretend that the people involved are uncomplicated heroes. Yet, by giving us the circumstances that lead to the crime, and by allowing us to spend enough time with the people caught in its aftermath, it creates the uncomfortable possibility of empathy. Before long, you find yourself worrying about whether these police personnel will be caught, which is a morally curious place for a film to put its audience in.
The writing by PS Subramanian and Vijesh Thottungal is the film’s biggest strength. Subramanian’s experience as a retired police officer, combined with the familiarity with police life that has become such an important part of Malayalam cinema’s recent crime storytelling, gives the film an unusually lived-in quality.
The police personnel here are not merely functional characters moving the plot from one twist to another. They have families and frustrations, egos and grief, friendships, fears, and personal histories. Even as the central crisis consumes them, these details remain visible.
Aleena is the sharpest among them. Early on, there is a sense that she is more observant and capable than she initially lets on. Parvathy plays this beautifully, without turning Aleena into an obvious super-cop. There is also considerable emotional conflict beneath her composed exterior, and the actor gives those contradictions enough room to breathe.
But she does not have to carry the film by herself. The four-member police team at the heart of the story works particularly well because every actor gives their character a distinct personality.
Sidharth Bharathan's Dasan, one of the officers caught in the crisis, adopts a physicality that suits the character well, his body language doing a lot of the work. Unnimaya Prasad brings her typical groundedness to Divya, the officer on guard. And then there is Sreenath, the police driver played by Mathew Thomas. Mathew has been showing increasing range, and this is another performance that suggests there is considerably more to him as an actor.
Outside that inner circle, Vinay Forrt, as station house officer Prathap Mohan gets the film’s occasional comic beats, landing as welcome relief exactly when the tension elsewhere needs a release valve. Azeez Nedumangad is also quite effective as the short-tempered, arrogant ‘Xavier sir’.
The most formidable presence in the film, however, is Vijayaraghavan as senior Crime Branch officer Haris Meeran. Haris arrives to investigate the very case Aleena’s team is trying to bury. Vijayaraghavan plays him with a stature that's been building since the character’s introduction, and whenever he walks into a scene, you feel exactly what he represents.
But Haris is also not merely an investigator whom Aleena has to outsmart. He is someone whose books she has read and learned from. That creates an unusually fascinating cat-and-mouse dynamic. It is almost a mentor-mentee relationship turned inside out.
Haris isn't a strictly by-the-book officer either. The film shows him as an officer willing to bend procedure when it suits him, and it adds a shade of grey that makes him a match for Aleena.
The film follows a storytelling structure Malayalam audiences are intimately familiar with by now, thanks to the phenomenon that is Drishyam. But even so, Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar finds enough texture of its own.
The first act is particularly effective at building this tension. Every small discrepancy matters, and every decision made by the police team carries the possibility of creating another problem. The audience is constantly several steps ahead and behind the characters at the same time, waiting to see whether something they have done will come back to haunt them.
And because the characters have been written as people rather than plot devices, the suspense has an emotional dimension. Neither their fear nor their desperation feels abstract.
This is particularly important given the nature of the crime at the centre of the film. Custodial deaths are not simply convenient thriller material. They carry the enormous weight of institutional power and the violence that can be inflicted by those entrusted with enforcing the law. The film does not entirely sidestep that seriousness. At the same time, it gives the circumstances surrounding the central incident enough context that the audience understands how these characters rationalise what they have done. It is precisely this uncomfortable moral territory that makes the film work.
Technically, too, the film is assured. Roby Varghese Raj’s cinematography makes the police station feel like a space where people are constantly watching one another. There is a contained, almost claustrophobic quality to several sequences, particularly as the officers’ options begin to narrow.
Mujeeb Majeed’s score is also a major asset. It knows when to stay under the surface and when to push the anxiety forward. The music around the film’s major turning points, including the sequences leading into the interval and the climax, is particularly effective.
But at around 2 hours and 45 minutes, Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar is longer than it needs to be. The final stretches, while still engaging, occasionally loses the tautness of the first, and some of its turns are predictable enough to take the sting out of the suspense. A tighter edit and a little more urgency in some stretches could have turned a very good thriller into an excellent one.
As it stands, though, it is still a gripping and thoroughly enjoyable thriller. But it also leaves you with the uncomfortable realisation that, for nearly three hours, you were hoping the people who broke the law would manage to escape its consequences.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.
