SPOILER ALERT!
Pennu Case, the first Malayalam movie release of 2026, has this paradoxical scenario where the movie needs to be generic for a major portion, for the climax to work. And what makes the movie underwhelming in most parts is the usualness they have deliberately added to the story. What happens at the very end of the film is not an extremely fresh idea. It is something we have seen in a classic Hollywood thriller, and what is impressive about Febin Sidharth’s movie is the way they have applied that formula to the marriage fraud theme of this movie.
The film begins with the arrest of our central character, Rohini. She was born in a village on the Kerala-Karnataka border and had to go to Mysore after her father’s death to find a job. Circumstances eventually forced her to do all these fraudulent marriages to get money. However, there was a larger game that was being played where she was just a pawn. What we see here is CI Manoj’s efforts to crack the bigger picture.
If Bahul Ramesh used distractions to hide the suspense from the audience in Eko, Febin Sidharth and his co-writers are trying to distract us by being disappointing deliberately. When you backtrack the whole story, the tactic makes total sense. But since the movie is narrated linearly, we don’t even get to feel the intrigue the police feel in knowing the character. And as the audience, we are also trying to solve the mystery in the movie. And what ultimately happens is something that we would have definitely considered as an option. However, since the “how” factor is relatively less used in Malayalam, even though the result was predictable, the path feels somewhat funny.
Like I already said, I think the movie would have had a bigger impact if they were able to make us invest in the police investigation. The backstory is so generic that you are less excited about knowing what happened and are hoping that something out of the box would happen in the second half. But again, the humor and investigation feel like lazy writing. I need to emphasize the fact that this particular lazy writing is deliberate. Since the predictability kind of makes us think about all the possibilities, the climax never becomes a shocker. There are these juxtaposing intercuts in the penultimate moment in the movie, and one could sense where things are going, before it even gets revealed. There are areas in which I felt a lot of the subplots created for humor weren’t landing smoothly.
The promo materials of the movie might give you the impression that you will get to see a lot of variations of Nikhila Vimal having fun playing a fraudulent character on screen. But when it comes to the movie, the performance has fewer variations of that character. What Nikhila has to portray here is the remorse of that character post the arrest, and she performs that part in a very convincing manner. Hakkim Shahjahan plays the part of CI Manoj in this movie. From the initial grumpiness to the eventual empathy towards the central character, Hakkim carried the overenthusiasm and sincerity of that character neatly.
The casting of the grooms included people who are seasoned actors to social media content creators. Except for Aju Varghese, most of them had only one or two scenes. Aju Varghese is perhaps playing the only groom character with maximum scenes, and his attempt to be a Kozhikoden guy by cracking an accent was so terrible. The naivety of that character itself was annoying, and the fake accent worsened it. Nirmal Palazhi would have been a much better choice if they were so adamant about cultural diversity. Shivajith has got a character that wasn’t really in his usual slot. The Ramesh Pisharody, Abin Bino combo worked really well on-screen.
Pennu Case is a smart movie. It knows how to keep things underwhelming in order to spike the graph at the right moment. And in terms of adapting a classic twist into a rooted rural story, they are taking an effort to make it less like a plagiarized thought. Since the movie is under two hours long, the usualness in the story never really becomes something that tests our patience. With the backtracking giving some sense to why certain things were designed that way, Pennu Case is a passable comedy that could use a bit more refinement on a writing level.
