Director Lijo Jose Pellissery is always searching for a variety of plots and themes for his next ventures. All of his films differ from each other in that path. His latest one, Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam was screened in the 2022 IFFK and receives wonderful acclamations. Now the film is out in theatres and is wrapped with positive responses. Veteran actor Mammootty's production banner's first production venture was Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam. But the film that came out for the first time through Mammootty Kampany in theaters was Rorschach. Likewise, the title of the film talks about the nap. The nap of a theatre artist named James and the routine of a local Tamilian named Sundaram was the element in the film. The structure of the script lies in the category of Magical realism. We had seen that kind of writing pattern in his previous film, Churuli. We can tie this film into the perspective of a character dimension contrast. While James taking a nap and awake as Sundaram and Sundaram taking a nap and awake back to James was the exact idea behind the film. The period between those two naps was the subject of the film. When we examine the film in detail we find that kind of confusing and somehow ambiguous underlying plot which is like a dream or a thing that is going to happen. There lies the open-end description of the film. The frames are like wallpaper because the shots are static which smoothly allows James to incarnate Sundaram. The ambient sounds like old film dialogues, devotional songs from the temple, radio songs, etc played a wonderful job to enhance the movie. All actors justified their characters the most. Lijo spends a lot of effort to find new faces for his characters and here also we can find strange faces. But it's quite unbelievable that a familiar face doing strange things throughout the film and that was Mammootty, who portrays both James and Sundaram. Yet another Lijo magic that feels like a nap done by James and others which fell us into a deep sleep encircled with a beautiful dream. And that dream is Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam.
