Zacharia Pothen Jeevichirippundu Malayalam Movie
This film is remarkably casual about the mystery genre as it bizarrely unwinds the incidents of the past from the imaginative description of three characters. Manoj. K. Jayan appears as the title character and Poonam Bajwa dons his wife Maria. The stagey dialogues by the characters and the love story evoke mundane moments.
A probe into the incident that happened in an estate bungalow by Sachidanandan (Lal) goes to the conventional route and there are blaring BGM and slow-motion scenes as ingredients. Meanwhile, Babu Antony as Chami offers a notable performance.
"Zacharia Pothen Jeevichirippundu" is the maiden venture by director Ullas Unnikrishnan. For a mystery film, the director adopts the run-of-the-mill ways that have been common in films of this genre. But the outcome of the suspense fails to serve the flick as a whole. Manoj Nair's screenplay fails to rev up the momentum quite often, and the efforts to create comedy in some areas bite the dust.
Perhaps, it is a story you want to like from the start, but a real suspense thriller requires more effort to make it endearing. With actors phoning in their performance, the film peters out sans providing the edge-of-the-seat moments for the viewers and the scenes hardly linger in the mind.
Through the narration, Ullas gives the impression that he has made an erratic imitation of the lessons of suspense genre. The hillside mansion and the winding roads are scarcely enough to create the milieu of mystery. An out-of-the-box imagination would have worked well for the movie to grab the eyeballs.
The technical and visual command of this flick is mediocre. It's a lukewarm mystery tale that misses the target when vies with the reasoning and intelligence of the audience.
MOVIE REVIEWS