'Love' Malayalam Movie Review: This Netflix Film Starring Rajisha Vijayan, Shine Tom Chacko Is About Anything But Love; Too Clever For Its Own Good
Check out the review of Netflix's Malayalam film Love starring Rajisha Vijayan, and Shine Tom Chacko
“Is there anyone who hasn’t thought of killing his wife even once?” a friend of the hero wonders aloud. During the lockdown, when this film was most obviously shot(clue: one-apartment location, limited number of characters,no outdoor shots except at the end) many murderous thoughts entered homes, heads and beds. Many thought of killing time. Some thought of killing themselves, While others may have thought of killing their spouses.
This Malayalam oddity ironically titled Love gathers together the residue of ugliness brought on by extra proximity during the lockdown and turns B R Chopra’s revolutionary murder thriller 1969’s Ittefaq into WTF!!!
While the film is stylishly packaged and shot , with the the apartment space being used in a tenable locational perspective(Jimshi Khalid’s cinematography glows in the gruesome), the plot careens from the mildly diverting to the absolutely ridiculous. It begins with Deepthi(Rajisha Vijayan) getting pregnant and ends with a murder.
But wait .The murder happens in her husband Anoop’s mind long before it actually happens.
So let me get this straight. Whatever we see happening in the length of the not-boring but decidedly-unhinged film, never happened. But what happens at the end, actually happened? Who is telling the truth and who is hallucinating? Is the director by any chance being as dishonest with us as the characters in this film are to their spouses?
This goodmaned lockdown plays such numbing mindgames on us, we can’t tell the real from the illusory But we can tell a good lockdown film from a fake one.Last year that amazing Malayalam actor Fahad Faazil gave us a brilliant lockdown film C U Soon which was inventive, intriguing and ingenious. This one tries to be all three and succeeds in being just inventive.
Co-writers Noufal Abdullah and Khalid Rahman(who also directs the film) have planted a plethora of redherrings into a plot that never evolves. It just sinks into the morass of its characters’ disturbed minds. From the first murder(or imagined murder) to a body being hidden in a bathroom,to intruders ringing the doorbell and making themselves comfortable in the crime scene , every character seems to have extra-marital thoughts.
If what we get from the lockdown is films about sex adultery and betrayal then China has a lot to answer for.
Image Source: youtube/apimalayalam, vismayanews
