Prithviraj and Parvathy play a couple whose marriage is on the rocks. To make things worse, he is accused of hoarding the money from a bank robbery. The film’s ambitions are certainly interesting. But it cannot settle on a single tonality, and is all over the place. Finally, it is neither thrilling nor emotionally affecting. That’s the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Prithviraj Sukumaran plays a government employee named Rajeevan. Parvathy Thiruvothu plays his wife, Meera. I, Nobody opens with a bank robbery, after which Rajeevan is taken hostage. Things go very wrong for the robbers, and an injured Rajeevan ends up in a hospital being questioned by cops. Meera walks in, but she doesn’t show the kind of care and concern you expect from a wife whose husband has just survived a near-death situation. Instead, her matter-of-fact behaviour appears to conceal something that’s bubbling underneath. Later, we will see that these are feelings of shame and awkwardness and embarrassment. Rajeevan, too, sees her with a look that suggests that he wished she weren’t there. So we seem to be in a story with two layers. One is the investigation about the robbery and the huge amount of stolen money, some seventeen crores. The other layer is an investigation into a marriage that no longer seems to be a marriage.
Nisam Basheer, the director, and Sameer Abdul, the writer, collaborated earlier on Rorschach, the psychological mystery-thriller starring Mammootty as a man with unknowable motivations. But at heart, it was a story of revenge. I, Nobody is far more ambitious. Apart from the layers about the marriage and the investigation, there’s an element of social satire – about the food chain in society – that’s meant to be chilling. People think Rajeevan has the loot, and they come after him like zombies coming after humans in a dystopian society. An auto driver casually crashes into Rajeevan’s car and demands a big sum of money. At other times, Rajeevan gets anonymous calls with men asking for a share. Given that Rajeevan is the protagonist, he has to be innocent, right? I mean, he can’t be an accomplice to the robbery, right? But then, we get the beautifully constructed interval stretch that reveals something shocking through the viewpoint of Rajeevan’s younger daughter, a little girl who’s playing a game and who doesn’t know what she has stumbled into.
Prithviraj, Parvathy, and the two girls who act as their daughters turn in solidly empathetic performances. The character of Rajeevan (and Prithviraj’s performance) works best when we see his inner life being impacted by the robbery and the widespread belief that he has hoarded the money. For instance, some cocky boys who study in his daughter’s school ask Rajeevan for some cash. At first, he refuses. But later, he realises that these boys could do something to his daughter, and he reacts the way the average middle-class father would. He coughs up the money from an ATM, retaining an impassive look all the time. Rajeevan is not a man given to big outbursts, and except in the fight sequences, Prithviraj makes us see this quality of someone who does not want to be noticed and is content to stay in the shadows. Even his anger with his wife takes the shape of a bedtime story he narrates to his daughter in a very calm manner.
Parvathy is equally good in the early scenes as a married woman who is sick of what’s happened to her marriage. Yes, Meera may have screwed up, but maybe Rajeevan gave her a reason to do so. Either way, she is not going to throw away her life and her kids to be in this unhappy home with this uncommunicative man. Like in Rorschach, an intimate story slowly branches out to include other people, like a desperate cop (Hakim Shahjahan) who needs money and thinks he can make Rajeevan part with his loot. At points, Rajeevan himself turns into what seems to be another person altogether. He exhibits reckless behaviour, and goes to the extent of hatching a kidnap plan. This is where I, Nobody begins to fall apart. In terms of plot, the first half works well, but slowly, Rajeevan becomes a big action hero and the twists become less convincing. The biggest problem is that the film’s tonality is all over the place. It wants to be both an affecting domestic drama and a thrilling heist movie, and it ends up being neither.
The flashy music by Jakes Bejoy does not suit the proceedings at all, and the flashy cinematography is utterly distracting. The single-take opening shot that ends without showing the hero’s face is brilliant. We only see him with a bag over his head. He is anonymous, a “nobody”. Later, the tracking shot that conveys Meera’s urgency inside a police station works beautifully. But otherwise, the fancy camerawork and editing try to do things like showing the past of a marriage through a single take that’s stitched together, and the vibe is that of a music video. We are not affected one bit. Elsewhere, we get a bit of three-way cross-cutting between Meera being interrogated by a cop, Rajeevan fighting off thugs in a shopping complex, and a YouTuber spinning his own nasty spin on Rajeevan’s story for views. Without all the showy technique, with a tight and focused approach, I, Nobody might have become something really unique, even with the running time of close to three hours. What we have now is an unsatisfying mashup of genres that’s neither a superhuman star vehicle nor a dramatic showcase for actors. I, Nobody ends up in the middle of nowhere.
