Love

Love is one among those lockdown movies like The Great Indian Kitchen that was made within the COVID protocol restrictions. The film is only 91 minutes long and what I loved is how Khalid Rahman manages to deceive the viewer into predicting something totally different from the actual climax. Love builds intrigue in a very engaging way, and the script has that backtracking quality, which makes the movie linger in your headspace even after you leave the theater.

Anoop and Deepthi are our central protagonists. The couple is going through a really rough phase in their Marriage. When Deepthi comes home after a medical check-up, an argument happens between the couple, and Anoop physically abuses her to a grave extend. What happens after this incident when two of Anoop’s friends pay him a visit on the same day is what we see in Love.

When you look at the movie in totality, it is a total package even in that commercial grammar of movie-making. It has its thrilling bits, it has those nuances of sarcasm, humor is there, and the emotional aspects of relationships are also there. Where Khalid Rahman has scored is in structuring the script. He has created characters with a significant level of conviction that your curiosity to predict the climax will remain for the entire length of the film, and the result will still surprise you. It is the multiple shades and multiple Perspectives of this movie that gives it a creative excitement.

Shine Tom Chacko gets a good screen space here, and barring certain moments of flawed Dialogue delivery, he was pretty convincing as the short-tempered Anoop. Rajisha Vijayan doesn’t have too much screen time here, and yet in the last quarter of the movie, she manages to give Deepthi a peculiar depth. Sudhi Koppa delivered the character assigned to him and was extremely convincing in presenting that fragile ego. The real star for me in this movie was Gokulan. As the unsure and doubting friend of Anoop, Gokulan delivered a brilliant performance. The humor Love derives from that character looked so organic, and Gokulan never made that character look gimmicky on screen.

Khalid Rahman has found a really nice balance between craft and writing in Love. He assigns a particular visual style to each phase of the movie. The scripting is so smart that you will have to do a backtrack of the story to understand the way he has placed the metaphorical elements in the story. Jimshi Khalid uses the claustrophobic space very impressively to narrate the tension-filled tale. The editing plays a crucial role in maintaining the movie’s tempo, and Noufal Abdullah has done an appreciable job, especially whenever shifts were happening in the movie’s perspective. That small bit of visual effects which was shown in the Trailer also was excellent.

It seems like a lot of filmmakers have found empathy towards women during the lockdown, and Love also advocates for women and takes a satirical dig at patriarchy. The good thing here was that the director is keen to tell the story in a compelling way rather than making statements blandly through dialogues. Some of the dialogues got muted by the censors, and I hope we will see an uncensored version once the movie is released on Netflix.