Level Cross Review | An Earnest Asif Ali Can’t Salvage This Underwhelming Psychological Thriller

When the movie Level Cross opens with that description of the film’s setting and then shows us this barren land, I personally thought this would be a metaphorical world that has something to do with the psyche of the characters. Arfaz Ayub’s debut directorial has symbolic aspirations for sure. But the writing, especially the dialogues, can’t really contain the intrigue, and hence, what you eventually get is an underwhelming psychological thriller that shows glimpses of something interesting.

As I said, the film opens with a statement that what you are about to see is a setting beyond time and space. So we have a barren land, and there is a level cross, which has Raghu as the gatekeeper. He has been living alone at that place for a long time, and at one point, he happens to find this girl named Chaitali, who jumped off from one of the trains. Raghu helps the girl to recover, and slowly, when the bond is formed, Chaitali shares her personal story with Raghu about how she was escaping from her toxic husband. How this relationship progresses, and the drama that unfolds in that equation with the unraveling of certain truths about these characters is what we see in Level Cross.

The barren land setup and how the initial edit pattern sets up the emotional contrast between the two characters made me really curious. As a cinephile, I am trying to observe every detail in those static shots to figure out these characters. There is a vulnerable moment between Raghu and Chaitali where they tell each other how similar they are in life. When you try to backtrack the story to the beginning, you sort of get an explanation of the twist in the tale with a twisted interpretation of the same line. The problem with the writing is that the melodramatic personal baggage of the characters is not really motivating the audience to decode this psychological layer of the story.

Asif Ali, as Raghu, has done a very impressive job, and more than the makeup, I would say it is how he applies body language that makes Raghu believable. It is one of those characters that can become an unintentionally comical one if the pitch becomes slightly louder, but Asif never overdoes that. Amala Paul, on the other hand, can hold the mystery with how she carries that character. But the dialogue delivery, at times, has this mugged-up feel, which makes the emotional aspect of certain sequences pretty flat. Sharaf U Dheen has fairly little screen time in the film. Similar to Amala Paul, Sharaf was also having issues with rendering certain lines that were supposed to make him an intimidating figure.

Arfaz Ayub, an associate of Jeethu Joseph, is the screenplay writer of this film as well, and his father, actor Adam Ayub, has written the dialogue for this movie. When you look at the setting of the movie and the mind games between the characters, you can clearly sense the writer’s aspirations. But the focus is more on the drama in the lives of these individuals that rather than having excitement to solve the puzzle in our own heads, we are getting frustrated with the oscillation of the movie from one perspective to the other. When you finally get an idea of what really happened, the reaction is “Okay” rather than “Oh wow.” Appu Prabhakar’s cinematography, which mostly has static frames, uses the landscape effectively to create the drama. We can see the use of Dutch angles in certain flashback sequences that have some shocking revelations. The usage of background score is at times interesting, and there are times it feels a bit too annoying, maybe because the writing has already burned us out.

I wouldn’t say Level Cross is a pretentious psychological thriller. It is a unique effort that just couldn’t crack it. The movie ends with the POV of a ghost that Raghu had mentioned at one point. But the execution of the movie is so underwhelming that we don’t really feel like making an effort to give an interpretation to that inverted POV. If you can find yourself excited about interpreting all those ambiguously placed elements in the screenplay, then this might well be the movie for you.