Roshan Mathew plays a cop who has suffered a tragedy as a child. Those memories trickle into the present day when he and his team investigate the case of a dead woman whose body is found in a well. The film is a procedural drawn from a true-life story, but it’s neither emotional enough nor exciting enough. That’s the quick review. A more detailed analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Roshan Mathew is one of those actors who’s “new-age”, and even his massy roles, like the ones in the recent Chatha Pacha, have that new-age sheen and sophistication. So it’s nice to see him enter the zone of a proper, old-fashioned melodrama like Uyir. It’s the kind of story where reactions are heightened and reaction shots underline what’s already been said or shown. This is not a diss. If the story is strong enough, this style – though dated – can be effective. And the story of Uyir does have a lot of potential. Roshan plays a probationary SI named Ajeeb. The opening scenes show us the source of his trauma, and Ajeeb still lies awake at nights thinking about this tragedy. After watching him handle a few routine events at the police station, we get to the big case at the centre of this story. The body of a woman is found. There’s a tattoo on her arm. Is it a murder? Who did it and why?
There are a few interesting ideas and plot points here. What happens when a husband peeks through a crack in the door and sees his wife making love to another man? The traditional response is rage. But what if the husband feels a great sadness, instead? What if his response is to pack up and leave, realising that he does not mean to his wife what she means to him? There’s another interesting layer in Uyir, about migrant workers landing up in Kerala, speaking languages that the local cops do not speak. Investigations, therefore, have become more complicated. Yet another “sounds good on paper” idea is about a mother who lacks maternal instincts, and there’s also an unexpected detour into the film world where a dance shoot lays the groundwork for a murder investigation clue. Plus, there is Ajeeb’s tragedy, and the question of whether the present will help the man banish bad memories of the past.
But the uninspired and over-emphatic writing reduces everything to a bland, generic watch. In a story like this, flashbacks are only to be expected, and in theory, the same events reenacted via two different viewpoints sounds terrific. But as it plays out, it just feels repetitive. The chapter titles feel fussy and redundant. Part 1 is titled “Ajeeb Rahman, Officer on Probation”. Part 2 is titled “Shobha, The Victim”. The film would have been fine even without these divisions. I am not against coincidences, like finding a wanted man randomly at a tea stall or finding missing children randomly in a faraway slum. But on screen, coincidences should be convincing, and that’s not the case here. What should have been a heartfelt scene with lost-and-found children ends up being a badly written piece of emotional manipulation with a huge background score that drowns out any genuine feelings we might have had. Even the shock of finding that a man is not who he said he was is muted. Uyir is uninspired at almost every level, and it gives the actors nothing to work with. All this may have really happened, but our concern is whether it’s convincing on screen. It isn’t.
