Aalparambil Gopi (Nivin Pauly) and Malghosh (Dhyan Sreenivasan) are the village loafers, wasting away their youth playing roadside cricket, wooing women and half-heartedly following the local right-wing party that they believe will win the next election and change their lives. Right off the gate, placing a satirical comedy about religious bigotry from the perspective of a hero, who hails from the saffron-clad party lines in itself is a novel way to lend weight to Sharis Mohammed’s political critique of a system that has rendered its young generation ideologically muddled with no sense of real-world understanding of how social conditions and online hate-mongering pit one group against the other. The hapless, lazy hero living off his working mom and sister’s earnings, with no real political vigour or sense of direction in life, sets the stage for a different kind of film than the one we ultimately get.
The film makes passing references to the way the ‘unofficial IT cells’ of the right-wing parties work through the character of ‘Malghosh’, where online hate and misinformation are spread through fake profiles and how the ever-lurking threat of ‘Taliban and ISIS’ is coming to get you’ is made into a psychotic paranoid war cry by a certain clueless faction of the right-wing party, that never bothers to see beyond the seething duality of ‘US’ vs ‘THEM’ narrative, the most popular mode of today’s political strategy making. We get a passage echoing a similar stretch from the Mohanlal classic Guru (1997) involving children and the film painstakingly lays down how even the most throwaway misunderstanding is blown out of proportion to meet convenient narratives that drive religious disharmony and distrust of everyone around you.
Nivin Pauly is highly effective in the comedic portions and the actor effortlessly plays the loafer, stumbling upon life’s real purpose with his iconic charm, and we can see a residue of his more popular screen avatars where he excelled in mining the comedic beats to its full potential. However, the part does not challenge him as a performer and the actor gets to walk away delivering a functional lead performance, in a film where ideological projection overshadows any real character work. Dhyan Sreenivasan is momentarily funny but the actor stays mostly away in the latter half.
