Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar Movie Review:
An accidental death occurs. The body has to be disposed of. Every trace of evidence has to be erased. The investigators have to be outsmarted. The truth has to be concealed forever. No, we are not talking about Drishyam here. But such has been the impact. It's a benchmark in such thriller narratives, and lately there has been a surge in different iterations of this crime-cover-up trope in many languages. Maa Behen (Hindi), Kuttram Purindhavan and Blast (Tamil), Mohiniyattam (Malayalam)...
On the surface, Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (PDK) has a similar premise. Something ghastly happens, and this time around, the duel is between cops themselves. Four low-ranked ordinary cops vs a veteran officer with an unblemished track record. The result is a gripping police procedural thriller that's cleverly written, packed with tension and twists, and never takes the audience for granted.
Director: Shahad
Cast: Parvathy Thiruvothu, Vijayaraghavan, Mathew Thomas, Sidharth Bharathan, Unnimaya Prasad, Azees Nedumangad
We first meet the protagonist, Aleena (Parvathy), as a widow being offered a job in the police department on compassionate grounds after her husband dies on duty. While she is offered a clerical post, she voluntarily takes up station duty. It straightaway gives us a picture of a resolute woman who's up for the challenges. Aleena joins duty immediately after arriving at her new station. She wears the uniform with pride. She is serious about the job. And Parvathy doesn't do any of this in a chest-thumping way, but more subtly with dignity.
Aleena quickly settles into her new job and gets along with her colleagues. At the police station, we are introduced to a few more interesting characters, like this rookie driver whose love life is in tatters (Mathew Thomas), a friendly ASI (Sidharth Bharathan), a perennially cranky SI (Azees Nedumangad), a constable yearning for a child (Unnimaya), an inspector with a beard (of course, an Ayyappa devotee). The makers spend the first few minutes familiarising us with the police station, its inmates and their dynamics. This is all before the title arrives at the most unexpected of moments. It may be director Shahad hinting at the ingenuity to come.
Aleena, Sreenath (Mathew), Dasan (Sidharth), and Divya (Unnimaya) find their lives and careers at stake after an unexpected encounter with a suspicious man. They panic, break down, and react in their own ways. Remember, these are cops who know the system's far-reaching vicious hands more than any commoner. The immediate response is not "Chin up, we're in this together", but more realistic and practical. Yet, they decide to stick together. They know the system and its loopholes. They know there must be a way out. They proceed with it. This whole stretch, featuring the inciting incident, is absorbing, edge-of-your-seat stuff as we root for the characters and feel the multitude of emotions they go through. Thankfully, the filmmaking doesn't rush things. It lets the characters breathe, pause, and ponder, which all add to the tension beautifully.
Initially, it is strange to see Aleena, the newest among them, being more composed and taking all major calls. The screenplay never explains this explicitly (no need to). Nor does it offer a backstory to underline her high IQ. We buy her competence from the introduction she gets — eager for the uniform, the hard yards spent in the training camp, and more importantly, her reading habit, especially her obsession with a police memoir written by Haris Meeran (Vijayaraghavan).
Things get spicy when the same Haris Meeran investigates their case. What follows is an exciting battle of wits, with Aleena drawing her knowledge primarily from Haris' book and Haris pushing beyond it with his real-world experience. In between, the other characters also do their bit. Sidharth Bharathan's Dasan is the most experienced, highly practical, yet not bogged down by the threats. Unnimaya's character is largely one-note, while Mathew does a decent job, carrying all the angst of a fresher.
Vijayaraghavan, whose career has seen a remarkable shift lately, delivers another fantastic performance as an investigator who has seen it all. It doesn’t take him long to smell foul play, starting with a brilliant decoding of a voice clip. What makes the character even more interesting is the lengths he is willing to go to in order to dig up the truth. He's mostly about the brains, but doesn't mind being unethical if it helps crack the case.
PDK also grounds its characters in real-world issues, which helps the film sustain beyond the crime cover-up trope. Aleena's past and lonely childhood appear in flashbits of nightmares, yet are enough to convey why she would never give up. But in the end, the film feels a bit too escapist and rewarding, considering how the system can often turn villains against its own servants. Or maybe it's too Shahi Kabir-esque.
In this film about guns and bullets, Chekhov's guns galore. Every minor detail, be it a passing well-wisher, a workshop, a drug bust, and even an elephant tusk, has a purpose. The rough edges peek through in this otherwise well-polished narrative when things get too verbal and explanatory, especially when the media comes into the picture later on.
Like any good thriller, PDK also has at least 3-4 extremely tense and captivating stretches. Particularly worth mentioning is the sequence featuring the relentless efforts to find a corpse, a very Drishyam-like idea that still manages to spring a surprise. Chaman Chakko's editing, which sustains the tension throughout, and Mujeeb Majeed's apt score, which heightens it, work wonderfully in the film's favor. Roby Varghese Raj's grim visuals, devoid of any flashiness, also capture the film's mood effectively.
With extensive research into police procedurals, including ballistic tests, writers PS Subramanian and Vijesh Thottingal ensure PDK stays a notch above the average thrillers flocking theatres every Friday. Perhaps the film could have benefited from exploring the moral complexities of its cops a little more. With the victim portrayed as an outright villain, whose death is easy to justify, the film leaves very little room for such ambiguity. Had it delved deeper into that aspect, PDK could have scored a rare double, where the human drama is as gripping as the procedural mechanics.
