Malayalam dark comedy thriller “Pravinkoodu Shappu” marks an eye-catching debut for writer-director Sreeraj Sreenivasan. Set in the pastoral landscape of rural Kerala, this whodunit niftily works with Agatha Christie-esque twists with a fair amount of absurd humor. Starting right from the opening scene, the film revels in its ambitiously eccentric setup and crafts a fairly engrossing, if not entirely original, mystery. And it does that with style, with some fantastic action pieces that show the potential of the debuting filmmaker.
The script, written by Sreenivasan, replaces the British Cottagecore mood of Christie’s stories with the crass and brash vibe of a village toddy (local palm wine) shop. Sreenivasan takes a passionately meticulous care in setting up the murder in the preposterously hilarious liquor shop setup, where drunken machismo is just a shove away. He is so fascinated by the absurdity of the murder premise that he finds excuses to come back to the same scene through a variety of POVs. This being the debut film, the inclination to indulge is quite understandable.
The absurdity does not stop at the murder premise. Enter the sleuth, S.I. Santosh (filmmaker Basil Joseph). This Sherlock Holmes/Hercule Poirot-inspired police inspector is full of hilarious antics. By his words, he believes in scientific investigation. Santosh, with his Holmes-like penchant for deduction, stands in stark contrast to his colleagues, to whom investigation means beating a confession out of the suspects. Santosh, however, is not as flamboyantly heroic as he thinks himself to be. One of the many positives of “Pravinkoodu Shappu” is the deconstruction of the enigmatic sleuth, who turns out to be hilariously fallible and prone to succumbing to temptation.
The murder mystery starts with the murder of the notorious toddy shop owner, Babu. At the time of the murder, there were eleven drunken men present in that shop. The shop was locked from the inside. So, it is a classic locked-room mystery where almost every suspect hates the victim. However, despite the presence of eleven suspects, the film notably focuses on two or three, thus making it easy for the fans of ‘The Queen of Mystery’ to foresee the primary twist. Sreenivasan plays with some clever visual deception to throw the audience off track, but most murder-mystery aficionados should be able to see through the ruse.
In order to inculcate these deceptions, the script has to move back and forth between timelines, thus making it fragmented. For the majority of its runtime, “Pravinkoodu Shappu” does manage to traverse the treacherous waters of a fragmented screenplay. However, it often comes close to becoming frayed with fragmentation. The script is often saved by the perfectly punctuated dark humor and some particularly well-crafted cinematic moments.
If there is one thing that Sreeraj Sreenivasan manages to do almost flawlessly, it is creating some cinematic pieces of magic on screen. Murder mysteries like this tend to be cozy by their nature. They generally do not demand a lot of action pieces. Fighting sequences and car chases do not go hand in hand with stories like this. However, the film creates the opportunity to incorporate a few such scenes. And boy, does Sreeraj Sreenivasan execute them well. There is a scene that establishes the bull-like fighting ability of the victim. In a John Wick-esque takedown, Babu battles multiple goons inside his toddy shop’s toilet. Then, we have a chase sequence where Sreenivasan pays tribute to Steven Spielberg’s “Duel.” A school bus chasing the scooter-riding primary suspect. The scene is quite beautifully designed and executed.
The cherry on top is the collective performance of the cast, which is gloriously led by Basil Joseph and Soubin Shahir. Joseph, in particular, is equally enigmatic and hilarious. A balance that was quite hard to achieve, but he achieved that anyway. His S.I., Santosh, is a memorable sleuth with the right amount of eccentricity and heroism. Shahir’s timidly cunning Kannan, one of the primary suspects, is the perfect foil for the detective. The directorial prowess of Sreenivasan is only complemented by Shyju Khalid’s cinematography and Shafique Mohamed Ali’s editing. The transition between the sound of Babu repeatedly bashing someone’s head with a door and the S.I. Santosh tapping on the table is sharply smooth. The kind of bold filmmaking we all need in mainstream cinema.
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