Malayalam film review: Shyamaprasad's nowhere thriller

Location, location, location. For real estate and for crime thrillers, there is nothing more important than place. It is where the blood is spilled, bombs are exploded and bones are interred. It is on its highways and in its back alleys that the cop chases the killer who hunts the victim. Shyamaprasad, whose movies win awards more often than not, knows locale is crucial, which he hints at in the title Ivide (Here). But why has Shyamaprasad gone all the way to Atlanta in Georgia, US, to shoot this film? Do we see anything of the East Coast or hear the thrum of the city? Except for a few shots of the Atlanta skyline, this could have been anywhere.

What could have been anywhere? The story is pretty simple but not straightforward: Varun Blake (Prithviraj) is a cop in the Atlanta Police Department; he was adopted when he was six by an American woman and her "hippie boyfriend" from an orphanage in India. His ex-wife Roshni (Bhavana) is, thankfully, a Malayali – we get to hear some Malayalam dialogue. She picks up their daughter and walks out on him one day, shocked by his violent streak that had him point a loaded gun at her. So where does Roshni fetch up? At the IT company, Infotech, run by her former classmate, the go-getter Krish Hebbar (Nivin Pauly), who has a Kannadiga surname but insists on speaking in Malayalam even to his poor Kannadiga mother. He realises early on that "education is the only way for those who wear a crossbelt (poonool, the holy thread)" as if the non-belt-wearing castes have plenty of other options. Krish is a player, who has set his sight on the post of the CEO and as Roshni as his wife-to-be.

But where is the thriller? Here. A few Indians are murdered in the city and Varun is convinced that these are all linked: racist murders by a serial killer.

A thriller has a basic plot – a crime and the search for a criminal – but the story gets loaded in the build-up of the suspense, in the layering of the characters, in the slow unravelling of motives and in the uncovering of a time and space that cause the crime to get committed. Instead, Shyamaprasad hangs his movie on cool glasses and stylish jackets.

He wants to talk about the American fear of Indians’ stealing their jobs; he also wants to hint at the Iraq war and, bizarrely, how the corporate war is worse than that; he wants to drag in an adopted brown child’s angst in a white country as well. That is too much to talk about. Nuance just jumps out of a skyscraper and dies. The brushstrokes of the characters are so broad and the plot so distractedly outlined that you don’t feel the thrill of the chase, the feverishness of a good cop-and-robber movie.

Shyamaprasad’s Atlanta, weirdly, is a city run by four companies, which include a trucking company and this Indian IT firm, not a metropolis with a booming economy that houses Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and a host of Fortune 500s.

Bhavana and Nivin Pauly look incredibly good when they have to play the good-looking immigrants driving home to work, cooking in the kitchen and flirting at work. The moment Nivin has to act evil and Bhavana distraught, it becomes an effort. Prithviraj pulls it off in most of the scenes, although he can’t help it if some melodramatic lines are scripted for him – "I may be adopted... But I am not a pet", for instance, to his mother – followed by a schmaltzy scene where he opens what is supposed to be a box from India that contains photographs of what we presume is an orphanage and – hold it – a book by Rudyard Kipling. Instead of looking for Atlanta, Shyamaprasad should have just searched for a story that made sense and gave some suspense.

PS: The one good thing? A big chunk of the movie is in English, with Malayalam subtitles. Maybe Adoor Gopalakrishnan should watch it. At the next Kerala film festival, he will not have to insist that Malayalis learn English to come to watch the films. The movies, you see, could be subtitled in Malayalam!