I feel like the director wanted to capture emotions like an indie film but also couldn't compromise on the commercial flick aspect, especially with the core fanbase of Navya Nair - older women. The first hour of the movie is extremely pointless. It follows the track of an indie slow burner but in such type of movies they might focus on the visual aspect, or the capturing of a character's emotion...in this nothing of that sort happens. There are character predispositions which eventually contributes NOTHING to the movie we are watching. Then there's 2 songs which follow the cliche formula. All in all, if this was well-edited to a 1h20m or even 1h30m it could have been a brilliant film.
Now let's move onto the next aspect- the story. Oh my goodness..it claims to be based on a true story. Now, "based on true story" might be used for even fiction (like Fargo), but here there's no intelligent use of this phrase. They literally mean to milk off a real-life incident but wait till you realize there's only 10-15 min part in the movie that is inspired by a true event. And even then it could have been done in less than 5 mins. But they chose to add extra masala and make it 10x exaggerated...it goes on for 10-15 excruciatingly boring sequences.
They also tried to make the ending stylish but it came off as goofy and laughable.
There are some forced references to Navya's debut film Nandanam. Not really a spoiler but when you hear her phone's ringtone in the movie you'll notice. If you are someone who loves that song, you'll hate it after watching this movie. The forced reference is so painful as we hear the ringtone play some absurdly high number of times (at least 20+ times in the movie). I hope someone tells the director that this doesn't count as an intelligent film callback or reference, rather it's just plain annoying.
Vinayan's performance was a saving grace. Actually excellent. That has to be said. Wish he could have gotten more screen time in the first half of the movie.
In the end, the current rating of 9.1 for this movie is an outright crime. It's barely a 6.5 or 7. But then we have cliche flicks like Jan E Man and Bangalore Days at 8+ and well made films like Salute down at 7..so this is expected anyway. IMDb needs to even further review their weightage systems for such films to avoid inflated and misleading ratings.
