Two brothers hell-bent on revenge walk into a local toddy shop, bustling with families. One of them cranks up the volume of the radio hanging on the wall as a folk song begins to play. As the song progresses, intoxicated men and women join the brothers in dancing to its tune.
In the midst of this revelry, a fight breaks out, turning everything into complete chaos. While one brother sticks mostly to street fighting, the other is more concerned with keeping pace with and eventually taking down those around him as he sways along to the background tune.
This particular patch of utter anarchy has an unmoored quality that seems more like style than substance, yet somehow it works. There are few such well-choreographed bursts of wackiness in “Anchakallakokkan,” though they come more scattered than not in its poorly written script.
The film is set in a Kerala-Karnataka border village in the late 1980s. Soon after Thankamani village’s infamous police atrocity (mentioned a couple of times within the first hour to establish both time frame and political landscape), it opens on Chaapra (Sreejith Ravi), a landlord leading a late-night drinking session.
It soon finds him stabbed inside a forest while chasing down a wild boar; Vasudevan (Lukman Avaran) arrives at this village as a constable immediately following his training period in what’s evidently been an extremely rundown police station. He’s visibly weak-kneed and stammering; violence-averse.
Head constable Nadavaramban Peter (Chemban Vinod Jose), apparently jovial cop that he is, runs this station; also Chaapra’s reckless, inseparable sons who’ve gone off-law-of-the-land crazy seeking vengeance for their father’s murder. The film proceeds from there as it peels back the layers of what happened.
The screenplay, co-written by Vikil Venu and the director, seems to be shooting for a neo-noir examination of men’s inherent bestiality masquerading as a murder mystery with an explosive temperament. But too often it doesn’t make you care about its characters who are all various shades of gray and the suspense is built by rewinding an incident from another angle so many times that it starts feeling less than organic after a point; more like an editing gimmick to hide the mediocrity of unimaginative writing.
Intermittently we’re made privy through one of Vasudevan’s nightmares to his traumatic childhood within a dysfunctional family, which becomes crucial to events later in ways that don’t effectively foreshadow the character’s arc. Similarly, the narrative around his character trying to bring in performative art form Poraattunaadakam as a leitmotif lacks clarity. As for women characters with agency or identity well, let’s not even go there.
Ullas Chemban the director does not disappoint in its fast first hour even as it borrows from Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie’s bloody tendencies. This is also true for its inconsistent second half where almost everything falls apart and turns into just another dull revenge drama. While on one hand, the technical side really helps with making the film look polished; Arun Mohan aka Armo’s visuals of the vast rustic village reminded me of Amal Neerad’s work in Iyobinte Pusthakam.
Peter played by Chemban Vinod Jose is not much different from any other role he has done before though they did try to give his character an original arc and he performs like clockwork. Lukman Avaran fits well for Vasudevan especially when showing off how shy this person can be sometimes while surrounded by people who acted timid for most part themselves too . Among supporting actors, Manikandan Achari stood out but it felt like seeing him get typecast over and over again was sad.
As much as Anchakkallakokkan could have been an interesting take on evilness, it turned out to be a boring revenge flick instead.
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