Ouseppinte Osiyathu is an interestingly staged drama that has the outer shell of a thriller. Even though an investigation is happening in the movie, which practically keeps us interested in the story, what eventually works in favor of the film is how it shapes the drama using characters. It is ultimately the exploration of the grey where you have emotions like desperation, greed, and guilt driving the characters. But by revealing minimal details at regular intervals of point, writer Fasal Hassan engages you in the story. Even though the craft of presenting the story does not enhance the written content spectacularly, the performances and tidy writing make this film an impressive attempt.
As you can guess from the title, the movie is about a man named Ousep and his family. His eldest son, Michael, is a Tahsildar, and his second son, George, is in the Police. His youngest son, Roy, is in the forest department. At one point, Michael and George get into a tricky situation in a business they both ventured into. To recover from that, they wanted the support of their father, and what happens in the family after they request some money from Ousep is what we see in the film.
It is the writing that makes this movie an absorbing watch. The duration of the film is only 118 minutes, and every scene you see in the film is relevant when the movie switches to that crime thriller mode. Initially, when you see a romantic track featuring Roy and his girlfriend, it almost feels like a generic old-fashioned song just for the sake of packaging. But be it the romance we see around that song or even the characters involved in a protest scene featuring the character Roy and his brother George, everything has a payoff in the final act of the movie. The script teases you with two possible directions for the movie to go and ultimately settles for the one that has a deeper emotional connection.
Dileesh Pothan, who performs the part of the extremely vulnerable and sentimental Michael, was my favorite performer in this movie. There are smaller sequences in the film where the character is off guard, and it is his performance that makes us feel for that character. Michael has always tried to hold the family together, and when you read the movie in reverse after understanding Michael, the story gets a very different emotional layer. The character is going through an emotional rollercoaster after the key event in the story, and the performance in those areas is top-notch. Kalabhavan Shajon, who plays the part of George, the other brother, performs the character more subtly, and it was a performance that complemented Pothan’s efforts on screen. For some reason, I thought if they could have used the same story as a Drishyam spin-off with Shajon playing a mellowed-down version of Sahadevan, it would have been a fascinating deviation for the Drishyam franchise.
Vijayaraghavan is playing the role of the titular character Ousep, but rather than being the connecting link, it is not a character or performance you would remember like an Appu Pilla. Hemanth Menon as Roy delivers an okay performance. Zarin Shihab, as Roy’s love interest Anjali, performed her part neatly, and it was nice to see her in a non-cheesy romantic shade for some part of the movie. Kani Kusruti, with her restrained body language, pulled off the small role of the investigative officer uniquely. Lenaa, James Eliya, Joji John, etc., are the other major names in the star cast of this film.
Directed by Sarath Chandran RJ, I wouldn’t say this movie is an exceptionally crafted film. The staging of scenes and how certain scenes transition into dramatic ones are not that captivating. The writing has this vision in it to juggle between being a character drama and a crime thriller. Since we know the crime and the criminal from an early point, Fasal Hassan is sure that no amount of twist can make this film unique. So he carefully creates a series of events that looks realistic on screen, and we sort of realize that everything we saw casually till that point, as the depiction of details of a family dynamic, had purposes beyond that. And even when the film leaves the trajectory we may hope it takes, there are enough sparks in it to make us read the characters of Michael and George again.
Ouseppinte Osiyathu is a well-written movie that gets the support of a superb performance from Dileesh Pothan. From a script-to-screen perspective, there are no evidently visible elevating visual craft for the movie, which I believe is reducing the wow factor of the film. However, with every scene having a palpable impact on the flow of the story, Ouseppinte Osiyathu manages to create a positive impression when you leave the theater.
With every scene having a palpable impact on the flow of the story, Ouseppinte Osiyathu manages to create a positive impression when you leave the theater.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
