I have often wondered about the seemingly endless list of acknowledgements at the initial credits of every Malayalam movie. But for Mukundan Unni Associates, the card says- No one to thank for. Well, what better way to start the story of our irreverent protagonist. The waft of fresh air only gets stronger from then on and at the end, the audience cannot help but thank the makers for bringing this ingenious work to fruition.
I watched the movie expecting another run of the mill legal drama and imagine my surprise when it turned out to be anything but. Mukundan Unni is a lawyer who believes he deserves a better life and is not above using all means necessary to achieve this life he honestly believes is his due. The character of Mukundan Unni is right in the wheelhouse for Vineeth Sreenivasan and he delivers a solid performance throughout. The casting is perfect and everyone plays their part according to the brief. It was good to see Suraj back in his familiar territory of the supporting act. Aarsha Chandini Baiju was a delight to watch as Meenakshi, a seemingly innocent character at first but with shades of acerbic ambitions. She could well be a femme fatale in hiding.
The plot develops through the clever machinations of Mukundan Unni as he games the system and the malleable greedy people in the police-legal-medical-insurance nexus. His soliloquys, while providing a window to his twisted mind also serves most of the film’s dark humour. The scenes are all well laid out, simplistic and achieving a remarkable smoothness that adds to the film’s novelty. The premises are all familiar- hospital, courts. Yet they are presented in an aesthetic way with the least amount of clutter. The movie is as much a triumph of good editing as it is of clever writing and fine direction. Props to Abhinav Sunder Nayak, Vimal Gopalakrishnan and Nidhin Raj Arol.
The movie works because it does not try to rein in its ambitions. The level of madness required in telling the story is kept all throughout the movie. It doesn’t fall to the usual pitfalls of serving a back story to explain the protagonist’s psyche or let karma do its bidding to deliver some poetic justice or the irresistible urge to convey a social message.
Towards the end, a character says she believes in karma and the other character’s response (by the way thanks to the Censor Board for not bleeping that) to this might well have been to all of us expecting the weight of consequences to finally bear down on Mukundan Unni. Nope, in this cinematic universe the twisted flourish and karma is stuck in traffic. The movie starts off promisingly, picks up pace, feeds off its own momentum and gives us an enthralling entertainer. The kind which makes us want to tell our friends or write a blog post about.
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GandhiSpeak 