Director: Althaf Rahman
Cast: Mamta Mohandas, Anoop Menon, Baburaj
In Althaf Rahman’s horror-drama, Neeli, a scene in the initial portion begins with a morgue-keeper pushing the corpse of a young rape victim into one of the freezers of the morgue, and ends with the man being brutally murdered by a supernatural force. In between, you see lights inside the room flickering violently, and a storm coming to form outside the room. The man hears a loud knock coming from a freezer. Perhaps to check if it’s a corpse calling out to him for midnight tea, the man goes to open the freezer, and bam!
Utterly predictable scenes such as this are a staple in an average mainstream horror-drama because it takes little imagination. There’s no detailing in the background or effective use of visuals to create an eerie atmosphere. The filmmakers rely on these cliched techniques to cover up the blandness of the film’s subtext, poor staging of tense moments and weak character development.
Neeli tries to retell the famous mythological tale of Kalliyankattu Neeli, a character portrayed in many movies and novels as a bloodthirsty vampire. Here, she is a guardian of women; someone who would nudge, harass or even murder men to protect little girls and their mothers. Lakshmi (Mamta Mohandas), an urbane single mother, returns to her ancestral home in Kalliyankattu village, to live with her grandmother. She has been through a rough inter-religious marriage that ended with the suicide of her husband, Alex (Rahul Madhav). On just her second day in the village, her little daughter, Tara is abducted by an unidentified man, leaving her devastated. In the events that follow, she gets in touch with the fiery feminist yakshi.
While the one-line summary of the film might sound promising, it is severely let down by inept making and an incoherent narration. For one, from the dark sequence of the death of a rape victim, the film abruptly shifts to a cheesy entertainer zone in the next scene. The transition isn’t smooth. For a movie that is titled after a woman and centred around a mother and an abducted child, the film feeds the audience a lot of petty scenes of men having fun. You see men whiling away time in a rural tea shop, and a local thief (SP Sreekumar) interviewing candidates animatedly to select an assistant (Baburaj). It spends unwarranted amount of time on the two thieves and their rather unusual modus operandi. Also, there is a ghost-hunter (Anoop Menon), a cheesy replication of Mohanlal’s psychiatrist from Manichithrathazhu. We meet him first when he is performing a session inside a women’s hostel room. The awkward staging of the scene reaches its peak when the man picks up an underwear from a window grill and the hostel inmates go into blush mode. It’s year 2018, and if our filmmakers believe that all it takes to make an audience of grown-up people laugh is ladies’ underwear, there is something seriously wrong with their perception of cinema and life.
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Buried beneath the pile of male gaze and cheesy laughs is Lakshmi and her underdeveloped backstory. In at least two identical scenes, you see Lakshmi at the local police station, weeping and screaming at the cops who don’t seem interested in her case. Her lines are similar too, revealing nothing new about her or about the film. Her relationship with her grandmother or the grand ancestral home with many rooms and corridors, lying just beside Neeli’s sacred grove, is unexplored too.
The nearest example to draw in to point out some contrasts is Aswin Saravanan’s Maya which, like Neeli, was centered around a single mother. The film let itself be anchored by Apsara (Nayanthara) whose personal and professional struggles occupied a core position in the film alongside the chilling tale of an abandoned forest and a mental hospital that functioned like a Nazi concentration camp. The plot and the subplot were rich and imaginative. Neeli doesn’t work for the same exact reasons as to why Maya worked as a film. It doesn’t take interest in its characters – neither the living nor the dead.
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The Neeli review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.