Kochi, India – Director Shahad and his writers, PS Subramanian and Vijesh Thottingal, have delivered a nerve-wracking hyper-realistic procedural with Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (prima facie culprits), a film that doesn’t allow the audience any time to rest. In a film titled after prima facie culprits, the writers spend considerable time introducing the police officers, making them feel ordinary and real before they collude to make a mistake bigger than all of them. It’s this thin line between morality and law that makes the film such a fine watch.
The narrative follows Aleena (Parvathy), who lost her husband and is given his job on compassionate grounds, along with Divya (Unnimaya), Dasan (Siddharth Bharathan), and Sreenath (Mathew)—officers whose ordinary lives and mundane duties make them fallible and relatable. Everything that’s supposed to go wrong eventually does, but these four, despite being officers, aren’t experts at manoeuvring the system. They know just enough about the gravity of their actions and what awaits them. It’s at this point that we’re introduced to superstar police officer Harris Meeran (Vijayaraghavan), the very definition of the kind of officer police movies are made for. When these two opposites collide, we get a stunning procedural about the good cops taking on the best cop.
The film turns into a peculiar police procedural with no limits to the detailing, as both sides are occupied by trained officers. There’s an imminence to the trouble ahead, and the culprits aren’t trying to escape law as much as bend it to their convenience. A mistake feels just an inch away, adding to the constant tension.
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Vijayaraghavan’s Meeran, a respected officer whose integrity slowly chips away, deserves a mini-series of his own. Director Shahad and his writers give us a hyper-realistic procedural with Parvathy and Vijayaraghavan in forms like never before, dissolving into morally complex characters. Through incredible writing, we get a nerve-wracking film in which everyone’s morality is dubious, but we’re happy to pick a side.
