Fahadh Faasil’s last few prominent roles have been emboldened with a distinct physicality as much as the characters’ internal complexities. The old age in Malik, the scrawny frame in Joji, the bald head in Pushpa. In this film directed by Sajimon Prabhakar, the physicality is not in the look, but is baked into the story itself. Anikuttan is a man caught under the debris of a landslide, and his struggle is bound to get extremely physical. Fahadh pitches this performance at a controlled note, despite having all the potential to go as berserk as possible. But this is a survival narrative where the disaster actually humbles the character, and the actor interprets the assignment beautifully.

This is not the first time Fahadh is playing an unlikeable character, but Anil Kumar (aka Anikuttan) has a visibly darker persona. He’s an almost irredeemable man, who’s not even on the path of redeeming himself at the point where the tragedy befalls him. The actor plays him with a lot of restraint, maintaining an aloofness that makes both the character and performance quite unpredictable. He goes about projecting his haunted self onto the people around him, and finds somebody to blame for all his personal inconveniences. But when a calamity occurs, with no one to blame, where else can he look, but inward?

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