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Join UsStar Cast: Darshana Rajendran, Prasanth Alexander, Ajayaghosh, Joe Baby, Sreejith Babu,
Director: Krishand
What’s Good: Krishand has an art of taking the most sensitive subject and turning it around into something completely absurd and new without losing the flavour. This is an idea that not many could wrap their heads around on paper.
What’s Bad: The movie, in the process of investigation, gets a bit repetitive, and that is the only point it dips a bit.
Loo Break: No, you are not allowed to, even if you are watching this on your TV screen.
Watch or Not?: Yes, you should. Scale the range of experiments that Malayalam cinema dares to carry out. There is so much to learn and get entertained.
Language: Malayalam (with subtitles).
Available On: Sony Liv.
Runtime: 153 Minutes
User Rating:
In a remote village, in a river, a dead body is mysteriously found floating. With no mark or proof of identification on it, this now becomes a new grid for the police department, who are busy pushing the case on one another. In this mix, two families are finding the missing men from their families, and that brings them to this landscape.
Purusha Pretham Movie Review: Script Analysis
Lijo Jose Pellissery taught the world how chaos can be tamed and made into a movie with his cinema, that is always moving with no rest in its grammar. To take his baton ahead, entered the amazing Krishand, who uses the same chaos partnered with extreme randomness to bend genres and cryptically but loudly make a very valid point. Much like Avasavyuham, the filmmaker is yet again on a hunt. A hunt to find a comedy of errors while walking through a plethora of genres, only to realise he made one already on the journey.
Purusha Pretham, the translates to a dead man, and the word Pretham literally meaning ghost (a term used by Kerala police for dead bodies), is a film that taps into multiple genres, bending them all and blurring the lines without even making anything feel heavy. There is a dead man, with no whereabouts, floating in a river, right after a celebrated righteous cop ‘Super’ Sebastian (Prasanth), has narrated a tale of his extravagant valour. Of course, exaggerated and partly false, his valour is reduced to being lazy and wanting to push the case away from his station when he tries to wash his hands off the dead body case.
While, it is a hunt for a man’s identity and how the politics of the land and country plays a huge role in it, Purusha Pretham is also about the genders and their hollowness. A man exaggerating his life, and forcing the world to believe in his idea of himself instead them letting them know the truth, just so he can rule over them. A woman enters the frame as a naive lady looking for her husband but later transitions into a character so fierce and flamboyant that you are surprised. Krishand with his writers Manu Thodupuzha (Story) and Ajith Haridas (Screenplay) has an array of things he wants to say with this layering, and it lands just right.
There is a very sharp political voice. He sets the movie in 2017, which is a couple of years before the pandemic, and a year before the devastating Kerala floods. He talks about the police system that has caught rust and us functioning at a slow pace. The laziness of it all, and the ignorance of the system. A dead body is buried and is missing, but the police are at ease about it all. Krishand also addresses how a man loses his identity with a piece of paper missing, how people in the top power narrate what the people below them should eat. How oppression can lead to people revolting, how it will not be easy to watch it unfold.
He does all of this marinating the story in extreme randomness. You will not be able to think of all of it while watching the film, because, at that point it’s a hilarious murder investigation/thriller that is also a comedy movie. It is when you sit am dissect post the viewing that you will realise the filmmaker wanted you to look at his ideology and not just the laughs.
Purusha Pretham Movie Review: Star Performance
Darshana Rajendran is a treat with her silences and minimal dialogues. The actor is introduced like the men were in the cinema of yore and it is such a fantastic scene to behold. There is ease in how Darshana approaches characters. Even with a script so over the top in its own way, her pitch never even goes a note higher to match, but it is absolutely perfect.
Prasanth Alexander as Sebastian is hilarious. He plays a part knowing that he shaped as a spoof, but in his head he is the best police office this system has to offer. It is a trick role to wrap one’s head around and play it so convincingly. Prasanth does that and shine bright.
Everyone else are very impressive in their own ways and there is so much to take away from how Krishand shapes the world of the parallel characters.
Purusha Pretham Movie Review: Direction, Music
Purusha Pretham is an experiment that required a very stubborn mind that stayed at it even if the absurdity sometimes felt not right. Because putting together this project must have been a task considering how random everything is until it all reaches the edit table. Kashind, who is fast evolving into a phenomenal voice, understands his product is not easily digestible, so he sprinkles things that will make it. Example, he uses real life newspaper clippings to sample his argument about dead bodies, instantly reminding the audience that it isn’t completely random but real.
Krishand being the DOP himself, partners with Ajmal Hasbulla on music, and together they create such a brilliant visual setup that it all smoothly fits together. Look at how they chose to introduce characters and the detailing that goes into every aspect of it.
Purusha Pretham Movie Review: The Last Word
Purusha Pretham is a movie that cannot be boxed in a genre but can be labelled as a chaotic randomness that makes the most sense. Krishand deserves to be discussed for his art!
Purusha Pretham Trailer
Purusha Pretham releases on 24 March, 2023.
Share with us your experience of watching Purusha Pretham.
For more recommendations, read our Writer Padmabhushan Movie Review here.
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