Haram

Even though the audience was not at all finding Haram interesting, I personally loved the first half an hour of the movie that kind of initiated an interesting debate about the modern day relationships. But soon after the happy phase, the movie slowly loses its grip on the discussion it was having. The events started to look too peripheral and the subsequent happenings that kind of changes the character, looks too shallow. With the back and forth blame game of the couple never really reaching a point where we feel to get involved in it, Haram unfortunately becomes a disappointment.

Story is about the relationship of Balu and Isha who were working in a corporate company. At a particular stage Isha who was feeling down after a breakup saw a good companion in Balu and later it became love and subsequently ended up in a marriage. But was that friendship enough to go for such a commitment like marriage? The film shows us the difficulties they had to face after the hurry burry marriage and how they got out of the cage.

Just like the recent films Annayum Rasoolum, Munnariyippu and Njan Steve Lopez, here also we have a director who doesn’t want to spoon feed his viewer. But unlike those movies, Haram fizzles away from its theme through vague sub plots that fails to create an impact. The urban lifestyle and thoughts looked sensible in the beginning, but when the traumas became more dramatic it looked like a verbal exercise of English words. With the content going deeper into its sulky best, the normal audience was finding it too difficult to bear. The emotional inter connection the writer wanted to setup through the parallel narrative was also quite complicated.

As an actor Fahadh Faasil gets a chance to display his talent through the complicated Balu. There is a level of charm which was necessary to introduce Balu to us and that was rightly there in his portrayal. The confusions, anger and frustration that comes after this was also presented wonderfully by the director. Radhika Apte was nice. Rajshri Deshpande, Sreekumar, Madhupal and Binoy did their characters nicely.

Realistic approach has been adopted by the director to tell us this urban story. The problem I found was with the constrained script that just focuses on its target audience (which is a small number) and doesn’t even try to invite other viewers to say their sensible perspective about the problem. When I finally found out about the Charity Vinod Sukumaran was mentioning, the question in my mind was whether this was the right way to narrate that “it is over move on” idea. Some of the intellectual dialogues about modern day love were quite interesting. Cinematography was good. I liked the Kanal kaatte song. The other songs may have suited the mood of the movie, but as the mood of the movie at those points were so unappealing, the music also sounded annoying.

Overall Haram fails to convince the larger audience about its content. With a vast script that chooses a dull path to establish a simple idea through many layers, the movie was a test of patience. The rating for Haram would be 2/5. Some of you may like it, but please make sure that you see it from a multiplex theater.