'Love' Malayalam Movie Review: This Netflix Film Starring Rajisha Vijayan, Shine Tom Chacko Is About Anything But Love; Too Clever For Its Own Good

Check out the review of Netflix's Malayalam film Love starring Rajisha Vijayan, and Shine Tom Chacko

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'Love' Malayalam Movie Review: This Netflix Film Starring Rajisha Vijayan, Shine Tom Chacko Is About Anything But  Love; Too Clever For Its Own Good
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“Is there  anyone  who hasn’t thought  of killing his  wife  even once?”  a friend of  the hero  wonders  aloud. During the lockdown, when this film was most obviously shot(clue: one-apartment  location, limited number  of characters,no outdoor shots except at the  end)  many murderous thoughts entered  homes, heads and beds. Many thought of killing time. Some thought  of killing themselves, While others  may have thought of killing their spouses.

This Malayalam  oddity ironically titled Love gathers together the residue  of  ugliness brought on by extra proximity during the lockdown and turns  B R Chopra’s  revolutionary  murder  thriller 1969’s  Ittefaq  into WTF!!!

While  the film is stylishly packaged and  shot , with the  the apartment space  being used in a tenable locational perspective(Jimshi  Khalid’s cinematography glows  in the  gruesome), the  plot  careens from the  mildly diverting to the absolutely ridiculous. It begins with Deepthi(Rajisha Vijayan) getting pregnant  and ends with a murder.

But wait .The murder happens in her husband Anoop’s mind  long before it actually  happens.

So let me get this straight. Whatever we see happening in the length of the  not-boring but  decidedly-unhinged  film, never happened. But what happens  at the end, actually happened? Who is telling the truth and who is hallucinating? Is the  director by any chance being as  dishonest  with us as the characters  in this film are to their  spouses?

This  goodmaned lockdown  plays such  numbing mindgames on us, we can’t tell the real from the  illusory But we can  tell a good  lockdown film from  a  fake one.Last year  that amazing Malayalam actor Fahad Faazil  gave us a brilliant lockdown film C U Soon which was inventive, intriguing and ingenious. This  one tries to be  all three and  succeeds in being just inventive.

Co-writers  Noufal Abdullah and Khalid Rahman(who also directs the  film) have planted a plethora of  redherrings  into a plot that never  evolves. It just sinks into the morass  of its characters’  disturbed  minds. From the first murder(or imagined murder) to a  body  being hidden in a  bathroom,to  intruders ringing the doorbell and making themselves  comfortable  in  the crime scene , every character  seems to have extra-marital thoughts.

If  what  we get from the  lockdown is films about sex  adultery and  betrayal then China has  a lot to answer  for.





Image Source: youtube/apimalayalam, vismayanews