Cast: Sreenivasan, Padmapriya, Lalu Alex, Lal, Nasser, Suraj Venjaramood, Bijukuttan, Sreeraman, Sona Nair, Cherthala Lalitha

Director: Liyo Thaddeus

Producer: Suresh Kumar

Cinematography: Manoj Pillai

Screenplay: Liyo Thaddeus

Story Writer: Liyo Thaddeus


Not every film starts off with one of the best actors in Malayalam, mouthing outrageous lines in a fluorescent office that looks straight out of a chewing gum ad. Pachamarathanalil, Leo Thaddeus' directorial debut with a whole lot of brawn and little brain has a few other disastrous firsts to its credit as well.

Sachidanandan (Sreenivasan) is a renowned cartoonist who leads a peaceful life with his beautiful wife Anu (Padmapriya) and a bubbly daughter Sneha (Ahina). When Sneha disappears midway through a commercial shoot, Circle Inspector Venkitesh (Nasar) gets busy hunting for clues, and unearths a few long buried skeletons from the family closet.

Pachamarathanalil might initially strike you as a kids' flick, all loud and noisy. An odd half an hour later, it suddenly does a revamping of its background score into a spooky one and claims to be a thriller mystery. The unraveling of it doesn't take up much time, and the latter half has a different story to tell. And before you realize it, you are in the midst of a riot and there's religion and there are morals and there are victims.

For a moment I did wonder if Pachamarathanalil was inspired from the Ben Affleck directed Gone Baby Gone. Perhaps it isn't, and Affleck wouldn't look at it as a flattering inspiration either. Unlike the Hollywood flick, the missing-baby-mystery here refuses to gape at facts straight, and since it moves about with its eyes snapped shut, misses out on internal logic and a critical sense of judgment. The film's major weakness lies in its transparency more than in its implementation.

With biggie names as Sreeni and Padmapriya donning the leads, I guess Pachamarathanalil must have had something appealing to it on paper. On screen though, Sreenivasan looks discomfited and totally embarrassed, and rigidly maintains a strange grimace throughout. Given the predicament that he has cornered himself into, even the smirk that he manages to come up with, should be a surprise. Padmapriya is infinitely better; and copes with the catastrophe with élan. She diligently makes do with whatever is on offer and doesn't make much of a fuss.

Manoj Pillai's camera strangely enough springs to life once, when it attempts to capture a door that opens out to the sea that lies beyond it. An exact replication of the cinematographer's mesmerizing shot in Kaiyoppu, there's magic on screen, albeit for a moment. You flit back and forth in time with flashbacks being thrown in dime a dozen, most of them drastically in need of a stern editor. The final reel especially reeks of a totally outlandish turn of events that simply goes on and on. And Alphones' tunes get lost in this mayhem that doesn't really call for much celebration.

On the one hand there is an increasing number of pointless twists and turns and on the other a sharp decrease in the film's vitality. By the climax the last leftovers of mystery and credibility have been so efficiently ruined that there's no genuine tension. Which is why the questions in Pachamarathanalil are much more engaging than the answers themselves.