Ennalum Sarath

During the promotions of his new movie Ennalum Sarath, filmmaker Balachandra Menon has said that why his last film Njan Samvidhaanam Cheyyum flopped in theaters was because the intended audience never came to see the film on the first day itself. And he said that with Ennalum Sarath he is trying to appeal to the FDFS category audience, which is the college campus audience. With all due respect sir, this marketing study of yours is extremely nonsensical and movies here have worked only because the content appealed to all category of audience. With a script that has no clue or conviction on how to start and where to end, Ennalum Sarath is a useless fossil piece.

So the film here is a murder mystery. Elizabeth was an orphan and she was a college student who died in a mysterious scenario. The investigation is happening and the investigation team is questioning everyone. Ennalum Sarath is taking us through the investigation and also the journey of Elizabeth.

So the first question that will arise after watching the movie would be why this title? The scene in which this title phrase was written by the heroine, there is a police constable reading it loud with a WTF expression. Well, that expression can kind of summarize my reaction towards the name and the film. Balachandra Menon has said that a news article about the death of a college student gave him the spark to write this film. Well, his effort to construct a fiction from that spark is extremely tacky and it seems like he has no idea about how the modern generation functions. He has tried to make a serious film with caricature characters. At one scene Surabhi Lakshmi is giving a social awareness class and I am like hello, please concentrate on the story. What the hell was the purpose of that character played by Jude Anthony Joseph?

Developing a one-liner thought into a whole script is the thing with all scripts. Some people make it by adding layers over that idea and some will just stuff in pointless things to make it look like a long story. Our hero Charlie who plays Sarath has no real significance in the movie. In fact, his first dialogue in the film is heard after 90 minutes and Balachandra Menon himself speaks something from the mouth of his character after that. The movie wastes a huge amount of time over a stupid comedic police mocking character played by Jude Anthony Joseph. The movie is shifting its focus to a movie director at that point and Balachandra Menon as a writer and director fails completely in making us get invested in that investigation. I felt like yelling “move on” watching the film. The much-hyped “Katta” suspense of this movie is a trashy marketing gimmick that won’t give you any shock.

The two heroines Nithya and Nidhi who respectively plays Michelle and Elizabeth are just okay and I hope in the future projects they will get better lines to say. The hero Charlie and Mr. Balachandra Menon have pretty much no space in the screenplay and ironically Sarath played by Charlie seems like an extremely irrelevant prop in the script. Jude Anthony Joseph perhaps has the most screen time here, after Nithya. The character is written very sloppily and his performance makes it even more horrible. God knows the purpose of Mareena Michael’s character. Even the talented Surabhi looks ridiculous in that police officer role. Mallika Sukumaran, Lal Jose, Idavela Babu, Nobi, Joy Mathew, Dileesh Pothan, Kottayam Nazeer, Sidhartha Siva and several others are there in forgettable roles.

Balachandra Menon has his viewpoints about a lot of things happening in the society and he is trying hard to squeeze in everything within this wafer-thin plot. In the future, if he is trying to make films that will have the perspective of young people, he should hire a proven young writer. Because his idea about the modern generation’s attitude and the routine is ultra fake. These days we have such authentic portrayals of the police investigation and this one looks like a laughable exercise with no sense of intelligence. The cinematography is disappointing and the music is also disheartening. Don’t get me started on the Sasi Paattu.

One of the posters of Ennalum Sarath says it has a record of having the most number of directors acting in a film. At least one of them should have told Mr. Balachandra Menon that this script and the making is ridiculous and needs rework. If you are the viewer who “loved” watching Njan Samvidhanam Cheyyum on TV (as claimed by Mr. Menon), well your next all time favorite has arrived.

Rating: 1/5