The female head of the house, a mother of three, might have cancer. A gloomy one-liner? “Watch me” says director Althaf Salim, as he turns this dead serious concept over, and makes it a boisterous but subtle situational comedy.

There’s a particular way in which this film treats comedy. It skips the obvious “drills” of events. A family is locked inside the doctor’s cabin (this is just after a motivational line about opening-the-door), and they get out. But we aren’t shown the very act and moment where they get out. We directly cut to the characters out of the room, with the mood pertaining to that line we got earlier – because that it what this scene is about. It is not about creating comedy by conveniently locking them up in there. And the film keeps doing this skip-the-essentials exercise throughout. Most serious and obvious moments are skipped over to give a dramatic effect of their own. The boyfriend meets his girl’s brother, impresses, asks when he gets to come meet the parents. Cut to their engagement. This is used to great effect right until the ending of the film, which uses the same method to hold back on information, which in another film might have felt forced for the way it tries to cheat.

What’s likeable about this film is the fact that it successfully avoids every single cloud of melodrama that seem to loom over the situations. The only places where it lets droplets of melodrama pour over itself, are as generic as thunder in a scene where something bad is supposed to be happening. The other place was pure exposition to me, where a heavy backstory was just narrated in a two-minute long monologue. Barring these blips, this a clean, light ride. The lightness is the actual conceit of the film. Take a look at Rachel. Her story mirrors Kurien’s, and this is something as heavy as “destiny”. But it just breezes past in a jovial line. There is only one place that the film chooses to disturb you, and that is during a migraine-like event. These moments effectively stand out amidst a very light soundscape.

There are talks of chemotherapy going on in the house, and we have a kid zoom around the dining table wailing “keemo-keemo-keemo”, almost like a minion going “bee-do-bee-do-bee-do”. This trivialising of a heavy term is shows how this film functions. I love how it keeps creating small events that stand as metaphors for times to come. Like knowing how much time is left for a person, gets a foreshadowing with a family leaving a film mid-way, not knowing who the murderer is. The father is “mentally unstable” in both the situations. The intensity varies, but the very fact that we get such a call-back is the surprise this film has for you. Everything you see has a purpose, and every piece of emotion matters, because you’ll be seeing it in later into the film. Right from a telebrand ad to a superstition It is usually reveals of factual information that play with your head, but here we get sentiments that turn new leaves. The starting-the-car superstition is a wonderful example of the same.

For a film dealing with death, NNO does a great deal in making it brim with life. The apt title translates to “an interval in the kingdom of crabs”, and the journey to get to this interval is one memory to cherish. This is yet another mainstream surprise from Malayalam cinema, for the way it treats its potentially-melodramatic subject and characters with explicit subtlety.