Oka Pathakam Prakaram Movie Review: A chaotic thriller that trades reason for surprise

There’s a chronic misunderstanding about the word twist in Telugu thrillers. Filmmakers seem convinced that if they dump a last-minute revelation on audiences, they’ve done their job. The result? A conveyor belt of so-called thrillers that lack both logic and actual thrills. Oka Pathakam Prakaram is the latest casualty of this misguided trend, an initially promising mystery that quickly dissolves into chaos.

Director: Vinod Vijayan

Cast: Sairam Shankar, Sruthi Sodhi, Ashima Narwal, Samuthirakani, Pallavi Gowda

Siddharth Neelakanta (Sairam Shankar) is a public prosecutor whose life goes off the rails after his wife goes missing. He turns to drugs, only to find himself accused of murder when his friend Divya (Bhanu) is brutally killed. He fights his own case, proves his innocence, and just when he thinks it’s over, there comes another murder, another frame-up. The police are hot on his heels, but who is really behind it all? So far, so decent. The first half convinces you, at least briefly, that the film knows what it’s doing. Good thrillers make you surrender to a higher intelligence, trusting the film to take you somewhere gripping. Here, as Siddharth is cornered, you feel the weight of the narrative tightening. And then—suddenly—it all collapses.

Suddenly is the operative word here. It feels sudden when Siddharth, a suspended prosecutor, turns into a detective. Suddenly, the same police who were chasing him give him full authority over the case. Suddenly, we get a backstory about child abuse. A character appears out of nowhere with a motive and a history of plastic surgery. But not just any plastic surgery, one that makes him look like a different person, only for him to then camouflage himself to resemble another character. The logic here is breathtakingly awful. If he wanted to look like this character, why not just get surgery to match his face in the first place? We are now in the territory of Common Sense Suicide. For a screenwriter, it is a crime to abuse plastic surgery as a plot device.

Sairam Shankar does his best, submitting himself to the screenplay’s antics without resistance. He doesn’t try to be a hero, which is both a relief and a missed opportunity. The real saviour, however, is Samuthirakani, whose foolish, fast-talking cop provides much-needed comic relief. When a thriller is this uninspired, the best thing it can do is accidentally make you laugh.

The title Oka Pathakam Prakaram translates to "As per a cold-blooded plan." If only the film actually had one. The much-hyped twist lands with all the weight of a feather; it’s pure deus ex machina, a revelation with no setup, no logic, and no payoff. In spite of this mess, I particularly loved those animated inserts of mythology and the division of the screenplay into chapters.