Ezhamathe Varavu

It’s rightly that 80’s film where we are used to see estates and those characters like the crooked estate owner, a guest, a helper and his innocent daughter. With beautiful visuals that almost take you into the forest and deep characters, Hariharan’s latest project, a rewamp of his own shelved project, Ezhamathe Varavu is a good cinematic experience.

The story narrates the arrival of Dr Prasad at Wayanad, an Archeologist who is there to do his research about an ancient city which was said to be there. During this time he happens meet his old college mate Bhanu and her ranger husband Gopinath. As the excavation went on, the women in the village were attacked by a tiger. Gopinath joins the guest house with Prasad as he was interested in finishing the forest beast. The main focus of the film is on the emotional journey of the main characters during this period of time.

It can’t be termed as a thriller as the plot has this hunting factor in the backdrop. It’s more of an emotional drama of the intense characters that we can see on screen. The script slowly builds the characters and enters the climax where they settle the equation. The annoying part I felt was in the performance of some characters as the actors couldn’t carry the heavy dialogs written by M T Vasudevan Nair. Some more sequences about the college life would have also helped the film in getting that feel perfectly.

In the performance analysis, Indrajith is on top with an awesome performance as the cunning and crooked Gopinath. In fact he was the only actor who was able to handle the character and he reminded me of Sukumaran quite a few times with that attitude. Vineeth and Bhavana were ok in their roles, but both of them failed in those post intervals emotional conversations. The new comer Kavitha who played the role of Maala is promising. Her resemblance with actress Parvathy is striking. Mamukkoya also did his part nicely.

Hariharan has handled the movie in a convincing manner with the help of some great visuals. MT’s script once again has those characters with depth. If they had lessened the degree of intellectuals in some of those dialogs, the film would have been totally devoid of that over dramatic tag. S Kumar’s visuals are stunning and the edits are also fine. Music is average and the background score is engaging. Limited use of the tiger shots with decent VFX made it look neat on screen.

Overall, Ezhamathe Varavu is for those who wish to indulge in the story and characters. My rating is 3.5/5 and a thumbs up to Indrajith’s performance. It’s an intense visual treat.