Uyir Movie Review
Director M Padmakumar's track record with cop dramas, like Vargam and Joseph, earned him a fair degree of goodwill in pre-pandemic Malayalam cinema. But sticking to that same old-school template even now, when audiences have consumed crime stories in every shape and form, feels like a misstep that his latest film Uyir never quite recovers from.
Director: M Padmakumar
Cast: Roshan Mathew, Baiju Santhosh, Shruthy Menon, Vinod Sagar, Athulya Chandra, Vineeth Thattil David
The film starts off in a fairly routine manner. SI Ajeeb Rahman (Roshan Mathew), a probationary officer in Kannur, stumbles upon the decomposed body of a woman in an abandoned well, and what follows is an investigation that keeps you interested for a while. The discovery that the deceased is a daily wage worker named Shobha (Shruthy Menon), the tracking down of her supposed husband, and the photograph that leads the cops to a Karnataka village- all of this is handled with reasonable conviction. There's a sense of procedure here, of officers actually doing the legwork, that lends parts of the first half a certain credibility.
Things start to wobble once the case takes its first big twist. From here on, Uyir leans far too heavily on flashbacks, narrated from multiple points of view, to unpack what really happened. Each retelling adds a layer, but the device is used so repeatedly that it starts to feel like the film is stuck in a loop. A tighter edit, trimming these portions by even fifteen to twenty minutes, would've made the whole thing far less exhausting.
The bigger issue, though, is that Uyir never quite figures out what kind of film it wants to be. Is it a hard-nosed police procedural? An emotional drama? A coming-of-age story of a rookie battling his own demons? It tries to be all three and ends up only partially succeeding at each, even if, ironically, its most affecting moments arrive in the climax, when the film finally commits to the emotional drama it had been circling around all along. That said, for all its excesses, Uyir never quite becomes a chore to sit through, and it works decently enough as a one-time, casual watch if you're not expecting too much.
Roshan Mathew delivers another convincing turn as Ajeeb. After impressing as a rookie cop in Shahi Kabir's Ronth, he slips comfortably into a similar space once again. He makes Ajeeb's stubborn refusal to give up feel organic, driven less by heroics than by the emotional baggage he quietly carries. Baiju Santhosh as Joy is a fine foil to Ajeeb. He keeps Joy understated and grounded, playing him as a seasoned policeman who knows when to be practical and when to simply be humane. Shruthy Menon also leaves an impression as Shobha, bringing several layers to a character that deserved better writing. Tamil actor Vinod Sagar, meanwhile, is well cast and handles his role with conviction.
Beyond Ajeeb and Joy, though, the police station never quite comes alive. Most of the other officers are written as familiar types, including the superior officer, and none of them get enough room to feel like real people rather than plot devices. That's a pity, because the two leads are written with considerably more care. The film is based on real-life incidents from a police officer's career, with the story by Anshad and the screenplay co-written by Shaji Maraad and Nikhil K Menon. Shaji, himself a serving police officer, had previously co-written Ela Veezha Poonchira and penned Paathirathri. That firsthand experience comes through in the procedural portions, which are among the film's more convincing aspects.
The biggest thing holding Uyir back is that it rarely catches you off guard. Most of its reveals are telegraphed well in advance, and the screenplay keeps delaying them as if they are still meant to surprise. By the end, you're left appreciating the sincerity of the performances and the emotional ending more than the mystery itself.