Aaro Review | Proof That Actors and Technicians Have EMIs to Pay

The reason why I decided to watch the movie Aaro, directed by Kareem, was that it had some phenomenal names like Joju George, Anumol, Rafeeq Ahmed, Bijibal, Noufal Abdullah, etc. But by the end of the movie, I realized that no matter how phenomenal these people are, they too have EMIs to pay. Aaro is a movie that has time-traveled from the late 70s and early 80s to 2024. With writing that would humiliate even the word cliche, this film was perhaps one of the few films the industry forgot to dumb during last year’s release diarrhea.

Thamara, a woman who sells flowers outside the Sree Vadakkumnathan Temple, is one of our main characters. She lives in a colony with her son, and all her neighbors are criminals and prostitutes. One day, a man named Murukan comes to the town, and he is in search of someone. As part of the search, he tries to connect to Thamara as he knows she has some solid information about the person he wants to see. Why is Murukan there, and what is Thamara’s role in that story is what we get to see in Aaro.

The story part of this movie is extremely outdated, and it is that ultra generic revenge story of a brother trying to settle the scores for his sister’s death. But there is no effort from the writing to make it look impactful. In fact, there are subplots in the movie with horrendous comedy that will make you storm out of the cinema hall. It is that kind of bad movie where instead of developing a story, we have the makers squeezing in template sequences, just to make the film have a 2 hour long runtime. 

The amount of time this movie, co-written by Kareem, takes to reach the point where it reveals some information that will give us a clue about what the movie is about is excruciatingly long. The hammy acting of most people in the cast just makes it even worse. Looking at the central conflict of the film, it never made sense why this 2-hour long movie diverted into ridiculous subplots that had no purpose in the film. There is a sequence where we see the death of the mother of the character played by the late Harish Pengan, and it has absolutely no purpose. By giving a forgettable background score, Bijibal was sort of giving the audience a subtle warning. I felt bad for Noufal Abdullah, who would have wanted to chop off half the movie on the editing table but couldn’t. 

Anumol plays the role of Thamara in the movie, and interestingly, she hasn’t done the dubbing for the character. When you know someone’s real voice, it is pretty annoying to see them in a different voice and to make it worse, the dialogues here were highly theatrical and shoddy. Kichu Tellus plays the role of Murukan, and it isn’t a challenging role for any actor. Joju George is there as a police officer, and the purpose of casting him in that role was to increase the poster value of the movie. Towards the climax of the film, the quintessential Thrissur movie component, Jayaraj Warrier, gets some scenes to perform, and frankly, it was partly forgettable and mostly unintentionally funny.

If I remember correctly when the title “Aaro” was shown on screen, there was this caption/ English translation at the bottom which said, “Who”. If the movie’s title was Aara? that translation would have made sense. Well, by the end of the movie, this mistake felt like the least annoying one, as the biggest mistake was the decision to go ahead with this film.