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Aaram, the latest police thriller starring Saiju Kurup, has a running time of just 109 minutes. And yet, one feels that they are beating around the bush in the earlier parts of the movie, just to extend the length of the film. The idea behind the story is very general. The experience of watching thrillers leads us to predict where the story is going and the film goes the same way. In fact, it still more or less takes the same path. Predictable writing and unnecessary drama fail to create any high moments, Aaram is a flat thriller that rarely offers anything fresh.
Our protagonist is SHO Anto Eapen of Firok Police Station, a policeman who has been suspended for brutality with suspects in the past. At one point, he gets accused of an accident case, where it is suspected to be murder. In Aaram we see how the investigation of this case takes Anto to some emotionally difficult, conflicting points.
The weakest part of the film is the writing. The way the dialogue is written seems very outdated. It’s almost like the return of all cop clichés. When certain characters say certain dialogues, you can easily imagine what the reaction will be. Future is also an important issue. When an event occurs that puts the protagonist in an emotionally conflicted space, you can imagine what he finds in the interim and exactly what happens in the interim. Another possibility that one can imagine is that a potential turnaround will occur at a later stage.
Director Rajesh Parameswaran wants to portray this movie as a character-driven police thriller and for that he is trying to show us the rough and human side of the central character. But the problem is that they can’t integrate it neatly with the narrative. There is a song in the first 15 minutes of the film that establishes the relationship between the hero and his son and it feels very forced. Some of the characters that occur in the middle of the movie are easy to predict, because we know that there is no background or character in a thriller without any purpose.
The film has a backstory dealing with the death of five people in a bomb blast and as the film progresses, we get more details about the case. A common man who does not know the details of that case will understand. But an SHO, in the context of this film, not knowing the details of the case felt like a logical fallacy. As the writers do on purpose, they make the police characters too dumb to explain things to the audience. The instructions given by the leader to his subordinates make you wonder how these police officers pass the police exam. The lack of planning stands out as we see them using film footage like mobile phone video footage with zooms and cuts in the film. The music is low. Some of the hero’s punchy dialogues in the film were so dull that I felt the editors could have removed them to avoid such flawed and unnecessary moments.
Saiju Kurup’s portrayal of this cop in Aamir’s Tamil film Aadibhagavan is one of my favorite roles. At that time, it was such a fresh casting that it showed us an unexplored shade of Saiju Kurup. Anto’s character in this film had the scope to be a very gray character, as the character is haunted by a moral dilemma in this film. Unfortunately, the director decides to make the character less complex and more heroic and hence the theme of a different police-character remains only in appearance. Anju Kurien has nothing to do here to contribute to the plot. Siddique gets to play an important role in the plot, but with relatively less time. Shaheen Siddique gets a role that is not important to the plot, but with more screen time. Looking at the screen time of the character played by Askar Ali, I think his deal was for promotion and the film was part of the deal. The role given to Sudhish in this movie was really good.
Aaram is a kind of film that tries new or innovative script-writing methods to present a surprisingly universal murder mystery. Unfortunately, the script written by Vishnu Ramachandran underestimates the audience and the level of drama in the dialogues and the structure of the events are very dated. As the twists in the story fail to create a sense of surprise, Aaram becomes an overwhelming and unforgettable experience.
