You wake up, retrace the same steps, tweak something small, and still land in the same place. That's basically the appeal of time-loop stories. They take the most ordinary anxieties: being trapped, wanting a second chance to get it right. Dhoomakethu takes that premise and drops it into the middle of a wedding. Lathin Kumar, aka Kuttan (Sajin Gopu), is 36 and finally getting married to Sharmila (Nikhila Vimal) after years of waiting. The film opens on their wedding night. Kuttan is nervous and thrilled in equal parts. Then a bunch of masked men break in and kill him, with Kuttan waking up on the morning of his wedding day thinking it was all a nightmare.

Director: Sudhi Maddison

Cast: Sajin Gopu, Nikhila Vimal, Ganapathi, Manju Pillai, Shine Tom Chacko

What follows is a wedding day which keeps hovering between the ordinary and the bizarre: there is a fly in the tea, a worker falling from a tree, rumours regarding why someone as gorgeous as Sharmila would marry a dark-skinned Kuttan and a rare comet passing above the ground, and so on. Individually, these could be typical elements of a wedding comedy. But when Kuttan starts going through them again, they turn into a pattern. Here, the film efficiently captures the essence of the time-loop genre. Repetition involves more than simply re-experiencing the events; it is about those events acquiring new significance. The repeated phone call, the accidents, the gossip, all of these things gradually become part of a puzzle, and the audience begins to put the pieces together just as Kuttan does.

The idea has been explored in Malayalam cinema in the past. Churuli took a more abstract approach to it, whereas Sambhavam Adhyayam Onnu, which came out this year, became more complicated. Dhoomakethu is simpler than both of these and is, in fact, simpler than typical loop films such as Groundhog Day, Maanaadu or Palm Springs. Director Sudhi Maddison is more concerned with the results that occur when a well-known device is applied to a very local and very particular social environment.

The first half is the stronger half by some distance. Each time Kuttan wakes up, we already know what's going to happen, although the way he reacts keeps changing and, as a result, the humour increases with each viewing. Writers Sonny and Manu are more interested in the comedy that surrounds the loop than with the mechanics of the loop itself. Things such as wedding rituals, family gossip, online voyeurism and the disapproving looks of all those watching contribute to it. Although the social commentary becomes a bit heavy-handed in the second half, most of the humour still arises from the situations rather than from any particular message.

Sajin fits Kuttan well, with a bit of his own Suku Sujithkumar from Painkili lingering in there, which actually works here. He's more of a nervous groom whose changing reactions to increasingly mad circumstances carry the film. Nikhila Vimal's Sharmila starts underwritten since the story is so Kuttan-centric, but grows as the mystery does, and gets more room in the second half in a serviceable manner. Ganapathi, as Kuttan's friend Anti, is reliably good and gets some of the best beats near its climax.

The second hour turns more investigative, with Kuttan piecing together things he'd ignored and chasing connections, but this is also where the energy dips a little. Once the nature of the loop has been explained, the excitement derived from discovering it can no longer be recaptured and so the film relies more on revelations and action. The major revelations turn out to be more conventional.

One of the more interesting elements introduced at the beginning is the comet, an event that occurs once every 3,000 years and disrupts communication and electronics. It creates certain expectations that the film never fully fulfils, and the eventual role of the comet ends up being thinner than the buildup had suggested.

The smaller aspects of the story work better; the locked room scene seen during the wedding preparations is given a satisfying resolution later on because it was well-earned rather than simply inserted at the last minute. The final stretch brings back the mad energy of the first half, closing with a visually bigger showdown.

Manju Pillai is memorable as Kuttan's mother, Shine Tom Chacko is comfortably in his usual eccentric zone, and Suresh Krishna's voice as the off-screen client is a nice comic touch. Ankit Menon's score tracks the shifts between comedy and action well, Jinto George's camera is effective and gets room to stretch in its literally explosive climactic portions, while Vivek Harshan's judicious editing keeps things to a tidy two hours.

In the end, Dhoomakethu does not bring anything new to the time-loop genre; the plot follows the usual pattern of beginning with a shock, then coming to an understanding and making an effort to escape based on that understanding. But what keeps the film ticking is that it focuses more on the comedy of the situation than on constructing an intricate puzzle around it.