Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar review: Shahad's taut thriller flips the crime genre

Cinema has long been able to reshape how an audience reads a person or an event simply through the perspective it adopts, the way it frames and cuts a scene, or the score it places beneath the image. A plain news account of the crime at the heart of Shahad's Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar might push a reader toward one conclusion about the culprits, given the country's long history with such offences and the stories often constructed to shield those responsible. The film, however, arranges the incident, its build-up, its aftermath and the people caught up in it so that the viewer never quite wishes for the guilty to be caught and punished.

The comparison with Jeethu Joseph's Drishyam (2013), in which audiences collectively sided with those who committed the crime, is inevitable, and the new film shares several parallels with it. Yet its concerns and its approach to the crime are markedly different.

For much of the runtime, the story unfolds through the eyes of Aleena (Parvathy), who joins the police department on compassionate grounds after her husband's death, and through her close-knit circle of junior officers — Divya (Unnimaya Prasad), Dasan (Sidharth Bharathan) and Sreenath (Mathew Thomas). Midway, the film shifts to the vantage point of Haris Meeran (Vijayaraghavan), a crime branch officer regarded as one of the sharpest minds in the force. Despite the ingrained habit of wanting such formidable investigators to crack difficult cases, the audience here finds itself hoping he loses this one.

Shahad, whose debut was the coming-of-age drama Prakashan Parakkatte (2022), raises his game considerably. He is helped by a taut screenplay co-written with P.S. Subramaniam and Vijesh Thottingal, and by strong craft contributions from cinematographer Roby Varghese Raj and composer Mujeed Majeed. A few conveniences creep into the writing, but they do not undermine a plot that progresses organically and keeps viewers on edge across a runtime of close to three hours. One of the film's highlights is the way it uses a book written by one of the characters to advance the story.

Even amid tense encounters inside a police station, where much of the action is set, the writers carve out room for humour that relieves the pressure. These moments are slipped in so cleverly, and often carry a bearing on the central plot, that they never feel out of place in a thriller of this kind.

Parvathy gives her character emotional depth, balancing the circumspection of a relative newcomer to the force with the sure-footedness of someone who has strong reason to survive against the odds. Vijayaraghavan, meanwhile, radiates awe as an investigator before whom even a perfect crime begins to unravel.

At a time when several Malayalam police procedurals appeared to be following the same narrative beats, Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar brings a measure of novelty to the genre.