Njan Kandatha Sare Review | A Stretched-Out Thriller With Outdated Writing Tropes

Towards the interval of the movie Njan Kandatha Sare, when Indrajith’s Jokuttan sort of realizes the trap into which he has walked in, we will sense the possibility of an interesting thriller where a witness of a crime finds himself in a difficult situation. But almost right after the interval, the film starts to act silly, and it sort of drifts away from the conflict we assumed the movie to address. With multiple tracks, some totally irrelevant to the plot, just extending the runtime pointlessly, Varun G Panicker’s Njan Kandatha Sare can’t salvage itself with its last-minute revealings.

Jokuttan, a taxi driver who lives with his younger sister, is our central character. He is a very naive guy who is still a virgin. At one point, when he was in a lodge with his friend, he happened to see the murder of a police officer, and he saw who killed him and what they did to the body. A panicked and shocked Jokuttan did not know how to react to this whole thing. Believing the words of his friend, who told him that there is a reward for anyone who gives information about the missing policeman, Jokuttan decides to go to the police station. The unexpected turn of events at the police station is what we see in this mystery thriller.

The fundamental issue with the movie’s script is that its tropes are pretty outdated. And that outdatedness kind of peaks when it reaches the grand reveal of events at the very end. The movie is under two hours long, and there are several unnecessary comedy bits and characters, who are placed in a way that, without watching the whole film, you can easily understand that they are not important for the core story. What makes this movie constantly underwhelming is the inability of the writing to create genuinely intriguing moments that will stick to the central event.

The twist in the middle and the revealing, in the end, seems like the two areas that made Varun G Panicker and the writer Arun Karimuttam believe that there is a possibility for a thriller. But like I always say about flawed films, Arun is not trying to develop the idea to fill the middle portions. He is just trying to stretch the screenplay with signature Baiju Santhosh humor, brother-sister sentiments, etc. When the film shifts entirely to a police station in the middle area, you can clearly see this pointless stretching. There was absolutely no purpose for that female police officer. The interval twist, which we thought would make the mind game happening in the movie more interesting, gets a very generic and silly conclusion.

Indrajith is in his usual zone with those mildly exaggerated expressions. There are several instances in the movie where his physique and the character’s reluctance to speak up don’t sync, and that is very frustrating after a point. The character given to Baiju Santhosh is almost like a rewritten character, which they may have earlier written for a usual sidekick. The movie overuses his Trivandrum slang humor, and those portions inside the station felt like a slog for the viewer. Director Deepu Karunakaran, who is the co-producer of this movie, has done the crucial character of the DySP in this film, and it was just an okay performance. Mareena Michael, Anoop Menon, Alencier, Sudheer Karamana, etc., are some of the other actors in the elaborate cast of this film.

If the writing was able to stick to the core case and create compelling moments one after the other to keep us interested in the movie, the final twist about the hero would have worked really well for this movie. But by squeezing in too many unwanted scenes and placing useless distractions in the form of characters, that final play felt more like a desperate attempt to salvage this movie rather than an impressive way to conclude a thriller.