Anweshippin Kandethum Review | A Dull Thriller That Relies Too Much on Twists to Salvage

The latest Tovino Thomas film, Anweshippin Kandethum, directed by Darwin Kuriakose, is a flat thriller that tries really hard to elevate its graph through twists but hardly succeeds. Set in the early ’90s, the movie wants to utilize the lack of technology in investigative methods to make the hero’s journey look tough. But the script written by Jinu Abraham is unable to come up with something that is genuinely unique, and with off-putting dialogues everywhere in the film, Anweshippin Kandethum is a dull experience.

SI Anand Narayanan is the central character of the movie. The film has two segments. One where Anand did an investigation very successfully, and a mistake that happened in the last lap of the investigation resulted in his suspension from the service. That particular investigation and the first case that came his way post-suspension is what we see in Anweshippin Kandethum.

Twists and surprises are essential for any thriller to be exciting. But for that, you need to build a world, establish characters, make the audience do their own investigation, and then surprise them with something that they never saw coming their way. In Anweshippin Kandethum, Jinu Abraham creates new characters whenever he needs a twist. Also, some of the characterizations are so typical that when they are finally revealed as the culprits, you don’t really sense any excitement around that revelation.

Tovino Thomas is in his usual element in playing the rookie cop. In terms of dialogue delivery, I would say Tovino was able to cover up the stiffness in the writing to a good extent. When I backtrack the whole movie, other than actor Sadiq, nobody else in the elaborate cast of the film gets enough time on screen to register their characters. Vineeth Thattil David, Rahul Rajagopal, and Pramod Veliyanad are there as the constant companions of Tovino, but there is hardly any scene there that registers their presence. Baburaj, Shammy Thilakan, Siddique, Indrans, Nandu, Asees Nedumangad, Kottayam Naseer, Arthana Binu, etc., are the other names in the lengthy cast of this film.

There is a similarity in how the twist is presented in both the cases we see in this film. And in both occasions, the introduction of a new character sort of takes away the shock from those moments. When the camera slowly unveils the culprits, you are able to guess there will be a twist, and the face will be of a different person. And when Jinu Abraham explains how this person was the one behind it all, that backstory fails to feel convincing or just feels very generic. The frames by Gautham Sankar follow this warm color tone to represent the era in which the story is happening, and the lensing enhances the thriller aspect of the movie. I felt Darwin Kuriakose could have staged the scenes in a more organic way to reduce the predictable nature of the writing.

Anweshippin Kandethum is a thriller that is pretty vague about its destination. The ending of the film has these scenes that show what our main characters did after their investigation, almost empathizing with them. But the dullness of the thriller with too many familiar scripting tropes just couldn’t elevate this movie to a level where we would think from the perspective of the police officers.