Nivin Pauly and Aju Varghese make a great team. But after a point, a ghost enters the story and dilutes the earlier focus. There are many interesting ideas but they don’t click as a whole. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Paachuvum Athbutha Vilakkum – a lovely film – showed that writer-director Akhil Sathyan was cut from the same cloth as his father, and in his follow-up, Sarvam Maya, we get more of this humanistic, feel-good flavour. Nivin Pauly is in excellent form in a role tailor-made for him. He plays a guitarist named Prabhendu, whose musical dreams are cut short at least for a while. He needs a job badly, and Rupesh – played by Aju Varghese – comes to his rescue. They are from a priestly family. It’s just that Rupesh has kept in touch with his roots, while Prabhendu has snapped his ties quite literally. He has discarded the sacred thread and turned atheist. But money makes you do strange things, and Prabhendu becomes Rupesh’s assistant. These early scenes are a joy. Nivin and Aju make a cracker pair, and the jokes – both situational and silly – land more often than not.
There are lovely side characters, the kind we find only in Malayalam cinema. Prabhendu has a bachelor uncle who he loves a lot. The man has his eccentricities: he won’t flush the toilet after using it. But he also has the life experience that comes with age. The man says that we all need someone to love us and take care of us. And for him, he is that person. He loves himself, and he takes care of himself. This is one of those deceptively simple lines that holds a worldful of wisdom. Prabhendu, too, is a man who has yet to “settle down” and who seems to be in no hurry to do so. But before he can find someone, someone finds him. This someone is a ghost, played by Riya Shibu with a lovely, easygoing charm. They almost become a couple. They may not be “together” together, but they become thick friends. He needs to find his way back to being a guitarist. She needs to find her way back to the hereafter. We have the basis for a solid movie.
But as it goes along, Sarvam Maya grows increasingly distant. The arrival of the ghost pushes the Aju Varghese character away, and I began to miss him a lot. But even if the aim is to slowly make the story more serious, this is not achieved in an engaging manner. One problem with Sarvam Maya is that it packs in a lot. There’s Prabhendu’s estrangement from his father. There’s a budding love interest, played by Preity Mukhundhan. There are questions about Prabhendu and God. There’s an assistant priest named Sreekuttan, who could have played a bigger part in the proceedings. There’s the trauma that Prabhendu carries due to something that happened with his mother. There’s a bunch of guys who sell drugs, which gives Nivin Pauly a small fight scene. There’s a cameo by a director who gave Nivin one of his biggest hits, and that film is referenced, too. Justin Prabhakaran’s songs are good, but their placement is off – especially in a wedding number. All of this gives the feel that a lot is happening and yet not much is happening.
The main issue is this: the periodic laughs cannot conceal the basic structural problem that the relationship between Prabhendu and the ghost is dragged out for too long, and there aren’t many high points in this central relationship. It’s a great idea that this isn’t a horror-movie ghost, but rather someone who’s as lost as Prabhendu is. They are both stuck being someplace when they’d rather be in another place. But this plot point is neither emotionally fulfilling nor entertaining. The ghost keeps giving life lessons like life is too short to hold grudges, but the screenplay doesn’t take these words to a satisfying destination. For these words to really land, Sarvam Maya needed more scenes with Prabhendu and his father, for instance. Even at the end, when the ghost has her big flashback, it’s not terribly moving. Like the rest of the film, this stretch is an easy watch, and then we move on to the next scene. With tighter and better-written drama, Sarvam Maya might have landed better. What we have now is a bunch of solid laughs and not much else.
