Imbam Review | In Terms of Quality, the Movie Has No Correlation With Its Title

It is expected to have aspirations as a filmmaker to create a campus movie or a political thriller. But the new film Imbam, directed by Sreejith Chandran, seems to be a movie that had no clarity about what to achieve from the story. Starting off as some sort of campus story, the film kept on shifting from one conflict to another, basically making the viewer wonder what really is the premise of this movie. With the plot getting dragged even after everything got resolved, this was one movie where I genuinely felt less privileged as people who sat around me were just walking out so casually.

The movie starts as a campus thriller where Nidhin Samuel gets involved in a campus tussle and gets suspended for his deeds. Nidhin meets a man named Karunakaran, who runs a weekly called Shabdam. Even though their meeting started off on the wrong foot, their love for art made them work together. The growth of this affiliation, along with the troubles that Shabdam had to face, is what we witness in Sreejith Chandran’s Imbam.

As I said, the script is really clueless about how to even set up a proper conflict. We are shown that the weekly is in a poor financial state and it needs help. Then they introduce this bad guy with real estate interest in the property where this weekly runs. And when the story runs out of fuel, they create a conflict to make this man an antagonist. The movie’s writing runs to dead ends every 20 minutes, and the writers detour to personal tracks of characters to extend the runtime. The radio drama-like dialogues and this stiff presentation of those dialogues by almost every actor make the experience even more annoying.

Deepak Parambol, the hero of the movie, is playing an extended version of his Saghavu Manoj character. Lalu Alex has the stature to make us believe he can be a Karunakaran. But even a veteran like him is struggling because the makers seem to be adamant about saying the lines exactly the way it has been written. Darshana Sudarshan is the typical heroine who has a huge sacrificial heart. Meera Vasudev is there in a minimal role with some importance. Irshad played the part of the antagonist in the movie, and people were laughing at the punch dialogue of the villain (I hope Sanju Samson never gets to see this film). Navas Vallikkunnu, with his mumbling dialogues added in the dubbing, takes care of the humor. Vijayan Karanthoor and the way he delivered the humor through that security character was just unbearable. Shivaji Guruvayoor, Kalesh Ramanand, Divya M Nair, etc., are the other names in the cast of this film.

One of the key mistakes I find in these new movies from debutant filmmakers is their adamance to stick to the dialogue without even changing the punctuation. The lines in this movie sound like a stage drama, and you can see talented and seasoned actors failing miserably to pull them off believably. I was like, how come nobody with creative power couldn’t sense that irritating nature of those rigid dialogues. The character development on a screenplay level is shabby. The editing of the movie is evidently terrible, as the editor is placing cuts without any sort of motivation. Some of the conversation scenes have been edited like TV interviews. The songs are kind of nice to hear, but the placement of those songs was really poor.

Imbam is yet another disappointing film that thinks the collage of a lot of dramatic moments can be considered an entertainer. There is a lot of emotional back and forth happening in this movie with cheesy sentiments that would have been okay for the audience almost two decades back. With a poorly written script dragging things to an excruciating level, Imbam is one of those films where you won’t feel like blaming the guy next to you for always scrolling through Instagram reels.