Many of us will remember Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam, headlined by Mohanlal, who essays a cable television operator in a small Kerala town, where he leads a happy life with his wife and two daughters. But when tragedy strikes his family in the form of murder (unintended though), he uses all the skills he had gathered over the years watching films to save his loved ones. The actor portrays a crafty character whose elaborate plan to cover up the murder committed by his daughter is not convincing enough for cops, who use brutality to try and fish out the truth. Drishyam 2 was not as engaging as the first part of the franchise largely because the incidents did not seem believable. Joseph has gone further down the ladder with his latest outing on Disney+Hotstar, 12th Man (Malayalam).
The work unfolds like an Agatha Christie plot. 12th Man has the right feel and ambiance, having been shot in the picturesque Idduki of Kerala, in a resort nestled in the mountains with its eerily foggy nights – just apt for a thriller. However, much of the action is confined – like a Christie movie — within the four walls of a large room
Eleven friends get together in the resort to celebrate the bachelor party of one among them, Siddharth (Anu Mohan). That fateful evening begins on a high note with a lot of liquor flowing and plenty of food on the table, till one of them suggests they play a game. Everybody would leave their mobile phones on the dining table and would have the speaker on during a call. Fida’s (Leona Lishoy) idea is not accepted by the rest, but they eventually come around to having a bit of fun in the belief that they are close to one another and have no secrets.
But they do have, and the night sees skeletons tumbling out of the little screens. Someone is trying to hide an extra-marital affair; someone has recorded it and is blackmailing her; someone is heavily in debt and finds devious methods to sort it out, and someone is bipolar. The curtain is up, and the friends, who had imagined that they were transparent, are disappointed and distressed by all that is vomited by the telephones.
And, when Shiny (Anusree) is found dead, things get messy and complicated, and what appears like a convenient plot point, a Deputy Superintended of Police, Chandrasekhar (Mohanlal), who had earlier crashed into the friends’ party, merrily drunk, is at hand! He calls himself the 12th Man, but soon understands that this is no game of cricket. He gets down to crack the crime, but what follows turns out to be an exercise in confusion.
K.R Krishnakumar’s screenplay is clumsy, and it takes an effort to follow Chandrasekhar’s line of questioning and deduction. He ticks off his list of suspects one by one to get to the guilty. Too many characters are crowded into the story by Sunir Khertarpal. The flashbacks are not crafted with seamless precision. Many of the revelations are predictable, and even the twist at the end does not create much of an impact – like the one in Drishyam did. It jolted us. Did it not?
Most characters are not fleshed out, and even Mohanlal gives us the impression that the script has not done adequate justice to Chandrasekhar.
The photography (Satheesh Kurup) is engaging, the location divinely scenic, but a movie is not a string of picture postcards! And, as much as Joseph might have tried, his 12th Man does not come close to a Christie thriller.
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