Sunny

Sunny, the new collaboration of Ranjith Sankar and Jayasurya, is a movie that tries to depict the idea of hope and a fresh start. It is set in the Covid 19 reality, and the theme feels very apt for the times we are living in. Towards the end of the film, Sunny is picking up each of the elements that kept him alive in the past few days, and even though we sort of feel for him, courtesy of an earnest Jayasurya, the writing isn’t deep enough to make us empathize with that character. Clocking at only 93 minutes, Sunny is definitely a watchable experience and not necessarily a moving one.

Sunny, a Gulf returnee is our title character. He has booked a luxurious suite room in Hotel Grand Hyatt for his 7-day quarantine. Sunny is a very unstable person who has been depending on alcohol since a lot of unfortunate events happened in his life. His wife left him, his business partner cheated him, and Sunny is practically clueless about dealing with the situation. How are these seven days of strict me-time going to change Sunny is what we see in the movie.

By seeing the trailer, if you thought the movie was going to depict the complexities of the human mind, then you are mistaken. Sunny is pretty much a Ranjith Sankar movie in all aspects. The overtly verbal nature of his films with a clear solution at the end is repeated here as well. Because it is a movie driven by a single character, there is this challenge of presenting the character’s angst without too many explanations. And that did create certain moments that somewhere communicated a lot of things subtly. But because of this tendency to go verbal rather than letting the viewer extract the information through details, you don’t get to feel that sense of relief through which the character goes through at the end.

As the only person in the movie whose face we see, Jayasurya, as always, did a really good job. As we are introduced to Sunny, he is this arrogant guy who is looking for an escape from all the problems in his life. Slowly he loses it completely, and then he tries to make an effort to hold things together. Even though the performance feels familiar, the conviction in his performance helps the movie a lot.

After Ramante Edanthottam, Ranjith Sankar joins hands with cinematographer Madhu Neelakandan here, and the movie is visually well structured. The corridors of the hotel, the emptiness you see in the rooms, the pale color scheme, etc., are in sync with the film’s tone. The music by Sanker Sharma is another major plus point that covers up the over-dependency of the script on dialogues. The conflicts and struggles of the central character have certain relatable elements in them, which definitely help the movie to an extent. But the writing is not that smart in terms of showing us the past of Sunny.

Sunny is more like an immediate thought that got materialized, possibly because of the creative hunger of the makers to go out and shoot something. Just like some of the recent Ranjith Sankar films, you would feel that it would have been a much-refined character-driven drama if they had the patience to go for a few more drafts. The intention is to give the viewer a sense of hope, but the kind of impact it created misses the punch by a whisker.