Kali

Barring the awkwardness of Sai Pallavi’s Malayalam, Kali is a fair enough movie that had the scope to be a really daring attempt, but may be because of the burden of expectations they decided not to go for the risky part and make it a more commercially appealing, yet realistic cinema with elements of fun and tension on screen.

Sidhu is this young man who has a very short temper. The guy loses his cool at very silly things and that has always been with him as a problem. Soon after college he gets married to his love interest Anjali and both of them are living a happy life with usual arguments and happiness. The movie primarily focuses on the journey of this couple to Masanagudi and the unfortunate series is of incidents that happen because of the angry nature of our hero.

The script written by debutante Rajesh Gopinathan has a very close resemblance with last year’s Anushka Sharma starrer NH 10. While NH 10 had the ego of the hero triggering the issues here we get to see the anger being the reason. The introduction part of the story that has a series of events depicted in order to show the character of our hero has that fun feel along with realism. The second half has this important episode of trauma. Sameer Thahir with his detailed style of realistic making succeeds very much in that portion in building the tension. The last quarter of this under two hour long movie tries to take that commercial makeover, which sort of disappointed me slightly (may be I was expecting the same braveness Anushka’s movie showed.)

It is really a pleasure to see Dulquer Salmaan evolve into a better actor with each film. The guy never over acts and I liked his coolness and on screen chemistry with Sai Pallavi. Well Sai Pallavi, the actress in her is definitely talented and in terms of emotions you can’t blame her at all. She speaks in her own voice in the film and I was expecting the makers to give a good reason for that “Kendriya Vidyalaya” type Malayalam. But to my disappointment the reason was not solid. A Masanagudi native can speak a mix of English, Tamil and simpler Malayalam Na? But the dialogues sounded too heavy. Chemban Vinod Jose was good as the antagonist and it isn’t a challenging role to be honest. Vinayakan in his usual style delivers a nice performance. It was fun to watch Soubin in that brief role. Overall the casting was good.

Sameer Thahir with his directional skills gives Kali that raw feel. He manages to get the natural best reaction from his actors and much like his previous directorial NPCB, this isn’t a background score driven treatment. The script as I said takes a relatively safer and less dark path. The humour and genuineness of the first half was good and I liked the way they managed to create a warm relationship between the lead couple within a short time. The darkness of the second half was also good with sensible situations and understandable desperation getting visualized impressively. As I already said, the safe play to make it that commercial happy ending cinema takes away a possible depth the content could have got. Cinematography was okay (Was expecting something beyond okay from the duo that gave us NPCB). Two tracks from Gopi Sundar have already impressed many. The BGM has no Man from UNCLE and I liked the usage of our own Chenda in it. Edits were fine.

So Kali overall looked good. Don’t expect something that will move you emotionally like the previous movie from the director. It’s more of a director’s film than the writers. Surely worth a watch if you aren’t looking for a conventional action romance package.