Noted film critic Pauline Kael, writing in the early 1970s, argued, “Movies are good at action; they’re not good at reflective thought or conceptual thinking”. A contestable claim, though it might be something director Nissam Basheer resonates with deeply. His films scramble timelines, introduce characters with breathless intention, and jerk into action with a density of information. There is hardly time to step back and take stock of the debris of information—the aftermath. In Rorschach (2022), with a mourning widower (Mammootty) trying to avenge his wife’s murder, it served Basheer well. The relentless unspooling of the film began to feel like a puzzle falling into place—intentions clarified, backstories unclouded, villainy and heroism solidified. In I, Nobody, however, it hollows the film out till it becomes a shell of itself—all rage, no respite. Fatally, the film is spun around a character, without bothering to ask or answer—who is this Rajeevan (Prithviraj Sukumaran)?
Caught in the midst of a bank robbery in Thiruvananthapuram, Rajeevan is thrust into the film’s plot. Like Rorschach, Basheer dives head-first into the story. Rajeevan has come to the bank to confront the bank manager, with whom his wife, Meera (Parvathy Thiruvothu), is having an affair. He has a gun tucked into his pants. Instead, three gunmen walk into this bank, pilfer 16 crore 73 lakhs, take Rajeevan hostage with them, and escape with him.
Dumping him out of the car on a highway, the three men leave, only to die in a crash. Curiously, nobody can find the money. The police and the news reporters become suspicious, as do viral vloggers. Suddenly, Rajeevan, a mere spectacled employee at the Secretariat, is no longer the victim of a bank robbery. He is an alleged accomplice to it. This shift in perception ruins his life—and that of his wife and two daughters, Amala and Jiya. Some people try to extract money from him. Others stalk him, hoping to find where he kept the money.
Each scene in the first half is built with care and shot with foreboding unease. You can feel an accomplished storyteller at the helm. Take the first shot of Rajeevan leaving his car to walk into the bank, the camera following him until the door closes behind him. Then we see the masked men enter. Then we see Rajeevan, mask over his face, being hounded into the van—his reflection in the car’s side-view mirror. All in one take, though it is suspicious whether all of this action took place in the time span of this shot. The film plays fast and loose with time. It is okay. It uses these long takes and later, a frenetic edit, to convince us a lot happened over very little time. It is the director’s conviction that matters here. You are on their borrowed time. The cars on the road, flitting back and forth, flicker, as though shot at high speed. This makes the image fragile. (Even when the mask comes off Prithviraj’s face, his entry shot, the ear lobes jiggle with such ferocious presence—I can’t remember the last time I noticed an actor’s ears.)
Like a pressure cooker, the first half builds heat on Rajeevan. Each time he stands up to people, in his muscular overtures and fist fights, he is immediately pulled up by the police, and his mess gets knottier. The humiliations pile up. Meera’s marital resentments—her deadpan but exhausted bailing of him every time he gets arrested—and his sweet relationship with his youngest daughter do not just assume a thick built-in world, but promise that in the ensuing hour this built-in world will reveal itself further. I loved the scribblings on the walls of their house—the first thing we see as we enter it. Meera is mostly always in her brinjal-coloured work uniform. She has a desk job at Sheraton. It is a detail that feels useful.
Then, what? Then, nothing. All is squandered by a film that treats its plot above its characters.
The fundamental flaw is that the film’s central character, the titular “nobody”, is, plot twist, actually a somebody—in the sense that if you push him into a crowd, he can pummel them singularly. But yes, apart from his suspicious strength, he is a nobody. How do you sympathise with that? Besides, how does he fight so well, this four-eyed government servant? The film offers not even a glimpse of a response.
Two things we know about his past—he was part of the ruling political party’s student cadre in college; he has a stormy, resentful marriage. Besides this, I kept wondering who is he? Why is he acting like this? As his family gets increasingly tangled, I had to scrub Drishyam’s Georgekutty from my mind, because I kept trying to put into Rajeevan’s mind Georgekutty’s stone cold intention and brutal mind-games that this film keeps hinting at, but never accomplishes. The problem is that there is nothing the film puts in Rajeevan—he is formed merely by the mechanics of plot. This might have been thrilling in the first hour, as the plot was tightening like a python grip—but then the tricks tire, and we see the film’s hollow center for what it is. This might also have something to do with Prithviraj’s performance, which even when he is supposed to be clueless has a hint of heroic knowingness—and we trust that knowingness to exist in the character. As the film goes on, we realize that there is no knowingness. His smug affectation is a hoodwink—to whom? To himself? To us, the audience?
The immediacy of events in the second half—say, a kidnapping—loses its tension in the back and forth. The media trial becomes a parody—even as the film is gearing towards its clenching final message. The Chief Minister is called upon to intervene. Meera is on the streets begging for attention. Does this couple not have parents? Relatives? Friends? Poor things, as encouraging company, they only have the absurd background score—Jakes Bejoy dabbles in Hindi lyrics this time, the way he did with English lyrics in Rorschach, yanking you immediately out of the milieu, the film, but hopefully not the theater.
The physicality of the action, too, loses its sheen once the repetitive nature of Rajeevan’s fights begins to feel like an excuse to see Prithviraj flex—not complaining too much, he has a fighting face worth mooning over, but as a character, where’s the meat? Some of the encounters, to be fair, are staged with a juicy menace and slam. Keep your eyes out for a fight in the claustrophobic cube of a lift. Bodies are being carved and deformed out of space as they fling each other against reflective surfaces. There is also a slap that comes much later, from whose impact my ears are still ringing. But all comes to naught as the film draws to a close. It is not that I, Nobody forgets to answer essential questions about its characters. It is that it believes those questions are redundant to begin with. But when the dust settles, it is not plot that stands upright, but character—plot is merely the thing being endured.