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Release date:
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Kerala: May 26, 2017. Delhi: June 2, 2017.
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Director:
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V.K. Prakash
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Cast:
Language:
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Sandhya Raju,
Vijay Babu, Jomol, Saiju Kurup, Vineeth Kumar, Aju Varghese, Asokan, Parvathy
Nambiar Malayalam
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In a week when Bollywood
has brought us that damp squib in the name of a thriller, Dobaara: See Your Evil, here comes a far neater suspense saga from
Mollywood and Sandalwood. Careful is
the Malayalam remake of last year’s Kannada release U-Turn, which was written, produced and directed by Pawan Kumar,
one of the brightest minds in Karnataka cinema.
Your experience of Careful will obviously be governed by
whether or not you have already seen U-Turn.
I kept the original bookmarked on my laptop until after I watched Careful for this review. I am glad I
did. Imagine knowing, before stepping into the theatre, that the butler did it?
Starring the very pretty newcomer Sandhya Raju with Vijay Babu, Careful begins tamely with two parallel
threads. Rachna (Raju), a young journalist living on her own in a Kerala city,
is pulled up by her editor for not filing any exclusive reports for the
newspaper. Meanwhile, a loving couple (played by Jomol and Saiju Kurup) spend
time with their only child. While tracking a bunch of seemingly innocuous
traffic violations, Rachna unexpectedly finds herself in the middle of a police
investigation involving an offender she is following. The cops suspect that she
is up to no good. After their initial high-handedness though, one of them
(Vijay Babu) ropes her in to help crack this baffling case.
Director V.K.
Prakash’s effectiveness in this film comes from an unusual balance he manages
to strike in the tone of his storytelling. When characters around Rachna begin
to drop dead like flies in a Baygon haze, the happenings on screen obviously
acquire a certain urgency. Yet, the narrative trots along at a sedate pace,
opting for a quiet air of foreboding rather than artificially enhanced speed.
It is as if the filmmaker wants to give the audience time to consider various
alternative reasons why a string of seemingly unconnected events may, in fact,
be connected – it is an unconventional choice to make in this genre.
Is Rachna feigning
innocence? Are her boyfriend, that couple we saw first and/or the cobbler in on
her game? What ties X to Y and Z? Or are coincidences being erroneously linked?
Have we been given all the material we need to solve the mystery ourselves, or
in the end will the maker throw in a plot twist unrelated to anything that has
happened on screen until then? Whatever conclusion you arrive at, I am willing
to bet that the climax is bound to throw up a surprise.
That said, it is
important to mention that the road to that climax comes bearing many potholes.
The writing of Rachna’s colleague-cum-boyfriend, for instance, is awkward. The
two are a mismatch. And though they seem very involved with each other, when
she disappears for several hours, he does not raise an alarm. Even his
dialogues come across as heavy handed in the effort to sound frothy – what on
earth was that about not wanting to have coffee with her?
That the police
would violate an individual’s rights is not inconceivable, but it does seem
strange that when the individual in question is a journalist, she does not
whimper in protest once she is free from their clutches. There are other
irritants, not the least of them being the unnecessary song in the climax right
after the big reveal.
Team Careful also does not fully understand
the workings of media organisations: pray tell me, which major newspaper would
expect a trainee to break exclusive stories on her own, instead of guiding her
through material fed to her by a senior?
In fact, why did
Rachna need to be a trainee at all? The protagonist would have been more
convincing within this plot if she had been slightly older and more experienced
– an age when a reporter would naturally be expected to discover stories as a
matter of routine, yet might still be intimidated by the unexpected and require
hand holding. If Sandhya Raju is not as impactful as her co-stars in Careful, it is not her fault; it is the
fault of this illogical choice made in the screenplay.
The rest of the
cast is impressive. Vijay Babu brings gravitas to his role as a determined
policeman. Jomol and Kurup opt for restraint in scenes that could easily have
been overplayed. Their performances and the strategically incremental doses in
which information is revealed to the audience are why Careful, in its overall impact, manages to rise above its
flaws.
The marketing of Careful has included a video testimonial by actor
Mohanlal stressing the film’s message about traffic
violations. That is an oddly reductive way to promote an entertaining whodunnit
that does indeed raise a relevant issue, but not quite so literally. The
message is not ‘about traffic violations’, for heaven’s sake. Careful is a thriller that, in its
poignant denouement, makes a larger point about our tiniest casual actions
having consequences. That it does so without an iota of preaching makes it uncommon.
This is an immensely watchable film.
Rating
(out of five stars): **3/4
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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121 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: IMDB
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