Rahel Makan Kora Review | In This Mediocrity Competition, the Audience Is the Losers

The title of the movie is Rahel Makn Kora, which means Kora is the title protagonist of the film. But the acting of Anson Paul as the typical Pala Achayan is so loud and terrible that, in the first half, an areligious me was religiously praying for fewer scenes featuring Kora. With no proper conflicts and unnecessary convolutions that could have been resolved quickly over a phone call, Ubaini’s debut feature film is a facepalm fest for the audience.

Gauthami is an m-panel conductor in KSRTC, and Kora joins her as a trainee. But after a few days, Gauthami lost the job as her appointment was temporary. The tension in the dynamic between Kora and Gauthami gradually fades when Kora’s mother, Rahel, comes to the town and builds a good bond with her. The events that happened in the personal lives of these two and how they impacted their relationship are what we see in Rahel Makan Kora.

Calling the writing of the movie amateur will feel like an appreciation since I have seen poorly written films in Malayalam that were bearable. Written by Baby Edathua, the script just insults your head from the beginning with lame humor and cringe-inducing sentiments. A local party worker taking the newspaper and saying 2 crows died when they hit the helicopter of the central minister is the very first line of the movie. If that bad joke is like a red flag, the entire film is a carnival. The character played by Althaf Salim is created for the sake of comedy, just like how Vadivelu, Vivek, and Santhanam used to have back in the day. In the second half, without much of a solid reason, the movie starts to act very moody, and I was actually happy as the unbearable Achayan act of Kora got less prominence in those areas.

Baby Edathua seems like a man who thinks a movie is a package. The scenes are so disjoint that the editor doesn’t need much of a creative instinct to chop. The selfless guy act of the hero in the second half was just outdated, and you kind of feel like laughing at the characters for their selective progressiveness. There is this subtle whitewashing of religious conversion as some sort of “wish” of the mother, which they kind of fixed in the final moments. The climax of the movie, where these two are getting married, has a particular fight, and it is so bizarre that instead of laughter, you feel like throwing something at the screen.

Anson Paul, who has been playing these good-looking bad or rough characters in whatever films he has acted in, tries to be this vivacious Pala guy, and trust me, it’s the worst thing about the movie. From the looks of it, many mumbling dialogues have been added during the dubbing, and it puzzles me that all the people associated with the film found it funny. I actually feel bad for Merin Philip. Be it her character in Happy Sardar or this one, she really shows potential to pull off some good performances, but the scripts she is choosing or getting are so terrible. Gauthami is a character who is going through a lot. Even though Merin is fumbling in some of the poorly written scenes with lengthy dialogues, compared to the mediocrity we see in other people’s performances (barring Sminu Sijo), this one felt like a masterclass. Even though the character of Rahel was kind of problematic once the movie entered the third act, I found the performance of Sminu Sijo very convincing. 2 States fame Manu is there as the comical villain.

More than 90% of the movies that are getting released these days are colossal flops. A big reason for that is the lack of basic research about the type of content that is getting accepted these days. Rahel Makan Kora is the kind of film that makes you wonder how a group of people with some sense of movies thought that an outdated and stretched-out idea like this with no solid conflict would work at the box office.