'Kammattam' Series Review: Solid Source Material, Mid Storytelling

In Shan Thulasidharan’s frantically paced Kammattam (Coinage), not a minute is wasted to push us into the world of crime. A man named Samuel (Jeo Baby) has been struck down by a moving car, and it’s clear, right from the word go, that this “accident” was very much intentional. A police officer named Antonio (Sudev Nair) is deputed to investigate. Within the first 10 minutes, the crime, the world around and the people involved have all been established with reasonable efficiency.

Samuel is said to have had a chequered past, and this makes him susceptible to almost everyone around him, including close family. The red herrings are laid out with similar swiftness, and by the end of the first episode, we’re left with a handful of suspects, each with enough reason to have committed the crime(s). 

Just when you feel invested enough to be taken along for the full ride, you sense the pacing becoming even more relentless. It’s designed to play out like a television series, but it becomes amply clear that it was a film chopped into six episodes. There’s a desperation to get us to the next big cliffhanger, and the exposition is so perfunctory that each dialogue feels like a Wikipedia entry.

This becomes too obvious as we go along. Not a single personality trait is offered to the show’s protagonist, Antonio, except that he’s meant to be a straightforward police officer. The actor has nothing to do but act out the characters with broad strokes. This wouldn’t have been an issue if the writing had been compelling enough for us to remain invested at a plot level. But the setup of most scenes begins to follow the same pattern. A difficult-to-crack suspect to caught and taken into the confession room. One dialogue of coercing later, all of them appear to be extremely happy to spill the beans, revealing everything from motive to modus operandi with generous amounts of detail.

It’s not so much about how basic the storytelling is as much as how it feels like a whole bunch of scenes were chopped off and rewritten only to deliver its “purpose”. This makes the series devoid of a lived-in quality or atmosphere as it chases one moment after the other. So, when we’re hit with a big surprise or a twist, we do not know enough about the reveal for it to matter enough.

The show’s source material deserved more patience and more mood. For instance, we find an elaborate conversation staged around three people in charge of running a cooperative bank. They go into detail about the many scams that go on at the bank and explain why people on the board want to hold on to their posts for a long time. The research work that must have gone into just that single episode hints at the possibilities of the source material.

Perhaps the cooperative bank operations alone could have been expanded to multiple episodes, and that’s probably why writers feel so enamoured by the mini-series format. But when even this episode plays out like a major information dump, you get nothing more than the satisfaction of a set of people simply reading out the screenplay. It’s perhaps a lack of budget or shoot days, but Kammattam could have benefited a lot from a minimal mood, depth for its characters and the patience to give their story the sprawl it demands.