Shamzu Zayba’s new movie Abhilasham is dealing with the idea of unspoken love. Written by Jenith Kachappilly, the climax of the movie has this segment where our hero talks about the habitual nature of his romance, and it is a portion that might become a hit reel or shorts when the movie is released on any of the OTT platforms. The issue with Abhilasham is that it knows the emotion it wants to crack at the end of the film, but it is extremely unsure about the path it wants to take.
Abhilash Kumar, a man from Kottakkal who owns an Attar shop and courier service, is our hero. He is in love with his childhood friend Sherin, who is now a single mother and has returned to her home after a long while. The return of Sherin gives Abhilash a lot of hope, and at the same time, the hesitation he always had in conveying his feelings was bothering him. What we see here is Abhilash’s efforts to express his feelings to Sherin.
I strongly feel that the climax would have been the first thing that came to writer Jenith Kachappilly while writing this movie. I am saying this because the rest of the movie feels like a poor choice of trajectory to reach this cheesy yet emotional finale. For the movie to be a two-hour-long conventional entertainer, it needs to create moments and conflicts. The reason that offers Abhilash a lot more time to be with Sherin feels ridiculously silly, and the introduction and purpose of the Thaju character played by Arjun Ashokan was extremely predictable. By the time you reach the final moments of the movie, you will realize that these two elements in the story were just delaying tactics, and they never really contributed to the main story.
The cluelessness of the writing to build an organic romantic track between the lead pair is taking the movie to a slap-sticky zone. What you see in 3/4th of the film and what happens in the climax has a major tone contrast. The kind of stuff Abhilash and his companions do, to help him in his love story, are too much, and it doesn’t look like those laughable mistakes. It was sort of exposing the hollowness of the script to find genuine humor. And to make things more cringe-inducing, Shamzu Zayba sustains too much on certain scenes and moments. The editor in your head would be screaming to cut a scene to reduce the cringe factor, but the movie would linger on that for a bit too long.
Saiju Kurup, as the main lead of the movie, in a way, felt like a misfit. There is this idea of screen age, where Vikram and Dushara Vijayan look believable as a couple on screen despite having a 31-year-old age gap. In the case of Abhilasham, it was a bit difficult to accept that Tanvi and Saiju Kurup were playing characters of the same age. The hesitant nature of the character was performed in that usual way by Saiju Kurup, while the performance in the last moments of the movie never really became overly dramatic. Tanvi Ram was able to carry the character of Sherin, who has gone through a lot in life, believably on screen. Arjun Ashokan’s one-note character Thaju was a harmless conflict in the story, and the actor performed this extended cameo kind of character neatly on the screen. Because of the flawed writing, Navas Vallikkunnu’s friend-character felt like an annoying addition to the character pool.
Abhilasham was a concept where I thought, if they had reduced the melodrama and used the climax to build a 20-minute short film, the feel factor would have worked wonderfully. The contrast between the stupidity we see in the behavior of the characters and the kind of romance it wants to show really shows you how the movie depends too much on humor over its central emotion. The kind of breathing space the film gets when Binu Pappu and Tanvi Ram have a conversation at the end should have been the movie’s tone. But unfortunately, that happens only at the very end after dragging a slim plot for almost two hours.
The issue with Abhilasham is that it knows the emotion it wants to crack at the end of the film, but it is extremely unsure about the path it wants to take.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
