Niyati/Destiny is a 2023 thriller drama set in the life of Mohan(Sudhansu Narayan Dash/Sanu), Radhika(Divya Disha Mohanty) and their child Ishan.
A family which had huge economic aspirations gets conned and the situations arising out of financial hardships and loan sharks(Kalia bhai : Krishna Kar), Mohan get trapped in between a rock(Samaresh Routray sir) and a hard place(4 friends : Kali, Sandeep, Ranjit, Bikash).
Fighting against the oddities Mohan has to bring himself out of the mess and safeguard his family. But how?
The movie is well written by Pinaki Srichandan. The maturity in writing is evident from his visualisation, perspectives and explores several shades of the character which a thriller demands.
With a shaky start the film picks pace with the entry of 4 friends...and that pace continues until the last scene with there chemistry and dialogues.
The screenplay is pretty good and the dialogues are good, barring the initial 20-30 minutes(felt very formalised conversation between a married couple of long time...visible awkwardnes).
Sandeep(Ankit Pattnaik), Kali(Bishan Balabhadra), Ranjit(Abhijit Patra), Bikash(Udit Guru) have done good work.
Good acting by all actors . But the Sanu-Bishan conversation, Sanu-Abhijit chase portion impressed me more . I have been following the work of Sanu since "Hello" so i can say he is a good actor but still remains an underrated one.
The lyrics is good and plot appropriate but somehow something felt lacking. The same with music as well, it was good but complete album was not marketed well. Odia movies rarely have good themes...good work.
Bgm by Nabs & Saroj ..maintaining their style ..decent work but more could have been done as well...
Costume and makeup ok ok...nothing much to complain.
All the set,props and locations were well..good work by Art Department.
Cinematography ...yes here we can feel the budgetary constraints but the talent of the dop is commendable ...with great effort he has shot some beautiful shots...some even reminded me of guerella shooting as well.
Editing is surprisingly good. For a thriller timing is very important...Editor has done a good job...generaly in chase sequences makers tend to repeat mutiple shots to stretch the scenes ..here nothing felt needless.
There is a shot where a character comes running to the forest ..then suddenly the focus zooms out to show his location...this is "actual talking without talking"..i like some ambient light shots as well .
I had some issues with lights in some scenes it could have been better....in a particular scene there is a sudden increase in exposure/increased brightness for 1.5-2 seconds...that could have been negated. Some glitches during rendering i suppose ..
I felt colour and DI required some rework in patches .
Kudos to S3 and RISA films...way to go. Instead went for newer lot actors and showed confidence in the new-commer Director.
Writer and Director Pinaki Srichandan has showed his callibre. Great effort for the first movie. Yes the film had lacunae and minor plot holes which exposes the systemic lapses a bit, those can be forgiven considering the budgetary restrictions.
Odia feature film Niyati
Genre : Thriller-Drama
Certification : U/A
Runtime : 127 minutes
RATING :
4.1/5*(3.9+0.1+0.1)
+0.1 for fight master/cordinator Aimon for his creativity with props and free running/chase sequences
+0.1 for combined efforts of DoP, Director and Editor.
