Adrishya Jalakangal Movie Review: Tovino Thomas, Nimisha Sajayan Film Is A Disastrously Dull Dystopian Drama

No one in Adrishya Jalakangal(which means invisible windows) has a name. They are meant to be Orwellian species rather than human beings. Or, so I gathered while watching this dreadfully dull dystopian drama which starts with police vans rounding up vagabonds and shoving them into a jail willy-nilly.

Tovino Thomas who likes to play invisible heroes, shows up in jail as one of the inmates who has been confined for no particular reason.

“Are you also mad?” he asks the doctor who laughs politely.

I didn’t know what to do: be mad or laugh politely at this dry disjointed meditation on wartime melancholy. Everyone looks grim and unhappy because, we are told, wartime is around the corner. Radio announcements in the background keep reminding us that war is near. The sound design by Ajayan Adat is the best part of this poorly conceived soured visual treat since this is more an aural than a visual experience.

Lamentably, we never experience any fear or anxiety on behalf of the characters. Tovino’s unnamed common man’s performance is marred by his makeup. Why the blackened skin and the protruding teeth? What are they supposed to signify, if not the vanity of a good-looking actor who wants to prove he can mess with his face for a role?

Nimisha Sajayan plays the woman next door, so to speak. She lives in an abandoned railway carriage facing Tovino’s abandoned rail carriage. Initially, they gaze at each other suspiciously, like two cats sniffing each other, especially since she has male visitors at unearthly hours. They are obviously not in this for a train journey. However, if the unnamed heroine and her male friends are having sex, we don’t see anything, except, once, when two pairs of slippers drop off from two pairs of dangling legs on a bed.

None of the characters, nor the plot, is going anywhere. Both are stuck in a time warp. A hovering aircraft, the siren of venomous factories(I have desisted from using the word ‘toxic’ which is overused these days) and the sound of blues singers on a transistor, give away nothing in this imperturbable film.

A kind old man is dying in his foliaged shack while in the morgue nearby Tovino talks to a ghost of a college professional played by Malayali cinema’s in-house Woody Allen Indrans, who it seems was gunned down for being an intellectual and a thinker in an intolerant society.

If they, the intellectuals and thinkers, make such films, murderous thoughts are bound to occur.