Valathu Vashathe Kallan, the latest directorial from Jeethu Joseph, is written by Dinu Thomas Eelan, who had previously made a fairly impressive debut with the Baburaj starrer Koodasha. The teaser of the movie that had the names of the lead actors swapped developed a lot of intrigue, as it generated a good anticipation about a script that could possibly have a complicated cat-and-mouse game. However, when it comes to the movie, it feels very preachy, where the methodology of one of the characters to make someone realize their wrongdoing felt extremely impractical. Well, one can argue that the purpose of mainstream cinema is to show seemingly impractical things on screen. But in the case of Valathu Vashathe Kallan, the conviction was not there.
CI Antony Xavier, a very typical police officer who prefers amicable settlement over proper investigation, is our main character. At one point, Xavier was in charge of the investigation of a missing woman case. The father of the girl, Samuel, had no faith in the investigation led by someone like Antony Xavier. What we see here is the plan setout by Samuel that puts Antony Xavier in a difficult situation.
The second half of the movie actually happens over a span of a few hours, and there is a life-saving mission in the hands of the police. But the level of exposition that happens through dialogue is so bad that you will feel like asking how all these people got into the police force. Like, there is one place where Leona Leshoy’s character says that the phone’s location is jumping, and they can’t track it. And a few minutes later, a cyber cell officer is explaining to a CI that the phone’s location is jumping from Sri Lanka to South Africa, they can’t do much, etc. I mean, he is a CI, and you are running against time. If you have to explain all these things to him, he is a terrible officer. In an attempt to spoon-feed information to the audience, they are messing up so many scenes in this manner.
Jeethu Joseph, as a filmmaker, is someone who depends on the script with very little effort to improvise on a filmmaking level. We can see that in the way he sticks to certain written dialogues. Some of the English dialogues that we hear in the movie’s final act just land in an odd way. The ultimate intention of the movie is to shed light on parenting. But when you finally get to know the whole plan, it almost feels like the guy who wanted to rectify the bad guy was the real psychopath. I mean, there is a moment in the movie where we hear that Samuel and Xavier have the same IQ. But at no point do we see Antony Xavier applying that IQ, and hence the whole game angle felt like an illogical choice of confrontation.
With the help of production design, the cinematography is creating these appealing, almost monochromatic images. Jeethu Joseph always had this obsession with certain single takes, and they used to look odd back in the day because of not-so-great visual effects. The “he is out there” sequence in Memories is an example of that obsession. Here also, we have a single-shot sequence in and around the police station. And this time the execution was smoother. To make things less preachy and more gripping, Jeethu Joseph is even replicating some of the iconic shots of Drishyam in Valathu Vashathe Kallan. But like I said, instead of feeling wow, we are feeling why. Vishnu Shyam’s background score is terrific in elevating many sequences. However, the underwhelming writing was not doing justice to the emotional heft of the score.
As I said in the beginning, the teaser of this movie gives us the impression that these characters are layered and complicated, and they can deceive you. But almost from the introduction scene, one can easily understand what kind of characters we are seeing. The way Antony Xavier looks at his colleagues when he is questioning someone just exposes that character, and there is nothing that excites us to know him better. Joju George gets to play a character that is very much in his zone. In the initial portions where he plays this unexcited version of Lalu Alex, he is great, and even in the police station sequence, his dialogue rendering style and body language work fine. However, when it comes to the planning phase, even he can’t deliver the dialogue in an exciting way. Vyshnavi Raj as Irene was fine in her limited scenes. Aadujeevitham fame KR Gokul is struggling with the dialogue delivery. Irshad, Leona Leshoy, Lenaa, etc., are the names in the star cast of this movie.
Valathu Vashathe Kallan seems like an idea they reverse-engineered after setting the final goal, as in what they want to talk about. Since the ultimate aim of the movie is to create a sentimental impact, the writing and making do not give much interest in how they should reveal details. When main characters are introduced to us, we easily know what all the traits of that character will be used later. There is a moment in the movie featuring Irshad’s character, his son, and Biju Menon. Ideally, it should have been a moment that we sort of get on a second viewing. However, the making is giving too much of a serial-like emphasis to the reactions of each character in that scene. Valathu Vashathe Kallan is a movie that wants to feel like a puzzle like Vikram Vedha, but doesn’t take enough effort to trust the audience and make the thrilling bits nuanced.
