Oru Kattil Oru Muri Review | An Outdated Relationship Drama With a Deliberately Scattered Script

Shanavas K Bavakkutty’s new film, Oru Kattil Oru Muri, is written by one of the finest writers in Malayalam cinema, Mr. Raghunath Paleri. In fact, more than the filmography of Shanavas, which has movies like Kismat and Thottappan, it was the Raghunath Paleri factor that gave me a feeling that something would be there in the movie. Unfortunately, what I thought would be the strength of the film ended up being the biggest weakness of Oru Kattil Oru Muri, and that is the writing. With a scattered screenplay that stretches scenes beyond a tolerable point to achieve 125 minutes of runtime, Oru Kattil Oru Muri is a heavily outdated drama that struggles to be in the engaging zone.

The movie has this parallel narrative nature, and we see the lives of three people through two tracks. Rukmangadhan, aka Gadha, is our hero, and he is now living in the city driving a cab. He has no place to live, and there are a lot of people after him as his startup idea didn’t work out, and he has a lot of debt. Then we have the second track featuring a Tamil woman named Tripurasundari, aka Akkamma, and her tenant Madhumiya, aka Parijatham. Madhumiya has certain issues with her family, and Akkamma understands that, and she supports her in getting a job. What we see in the movie Oru Kattil Oru Muri is the various events happening in the lives of these people and how they cross paths.

There are certain scenes in this movie that have the hero saving one lady from a probable relationship fraud, and then in the second half, he is helping an elderly couple. I was hoping somewhere toward the end, we would get to know the relevance of these two tracks in the film. But it never got a mention at a later stage, and all I can assume is that they were placed in the movie just to show the audience how good our hero is as a person. The screenplay’s efforts to make the climax look exciting only result in a lot of confusion, and when you sort of connect all these disjoint scenes knowing the actual story, all those subplots start to feel like a pointless distraction.

The humor of certain laureates is, at times, too sophisticated for the commoner to feel funny. Whenever I have seen the interviews of Raghunath Paleri, I can see him describing things in the most poetic manner. The problem with his writing is that he assigns that kind of vocabulary and sense of humor to almost all of his characters. The viewers are already struggling to connect the disjoint tracks in the movie, and when they hear these dialogues that are way too dramatic or over-intellectualized, it just feels like a pretentious effort of the writer to show off his vocabulary. The romanticizing of pain through dialogue does not help the movie add depth to these main characters, as there is no effort to give us enough material to empathize with them.

Poornima Indrajith as Akkamma carries the grace and comforting energy of her character neatly. The dialogues are pretty stiff, and I would say she was able to handle them in a fairly decent way to reduce the amount of cringe. Hakkim Shah, as the main lead, is in that zone of a struggling guy with temper issues, and in some of the conversation scenes with the character played by Raghunath Paleri, we can see him finding it difficult to carry the dialogues. Priyamvadha Krishnan is playing that sad and curious young woman whose issues are a mystery to us. Even in that performance, the dialogues are becoming an issue as the lines aren’t flowing organically. Even the father character, played by Shammy Thilakan, has this artificial positivity that sort of disconnects the audience from the share of issues in the lives of those people.

At its core, Oru Kattil Oru Muri is about forgiveness and second chances. But the experimentation of the screenplay gives way to too many unnecessary tracks, including one that has three buffoon-like goons running after the hero and heroine. At one point, the movie even started to look like the recently released Dileep movie Pavi Care Taker. I am someone who has loved Shanavas K Bavakkutty’s first two films. The scary/ disappointing part for me was the fact that he never felt like tweaking the dialogue or reducing the lingering feel of cheesy melodrama in multiple scenes of this movie.