‘Barroz’ Movie Review: Mohanlal's 3D-Obsessed Children’s Film Has Adult-Sized Issues
Mohanlal's debut directorial is so desperate to shock you with its 3D pop-out shots that it forgets that films are meant to draw you in.
Director: Mohanlal
Writer: Story by Jijo
Cast: Mohanlal, Maya Rao West, Guru Somasundaram, Tuhin Menon, Ignacio Mateos
Language: Malayalam
When the director’s credit appears at the end of Barroz, we’re not moved because of the film we just saw. Just the simple idea to write ‘Directed by Mohanlal’ in the font in which the title of Manjil Virinja Pookal (1980) appeared 44 years ago, hints at the emotions that went into making Mohanlal’s directorial debut.
But for an actor so devoted to the minutest of emotions, capable of making us feel so connected to everything he feels on screen—and off it—why is it that we feel distanced from his directorial debut?
Written by Jijo, the director of My Dear Kuttichathan (1984), Barroz is a film made for children. It is told from the point of view of a 13-year-old girl named Isa (Maya Rao West) when she visits Goa with her millionaire dad. She has just been suspended from school, and you’re told she’s acting out because she misses her mother. These are classic templates of the many children’s films we’ve seen before—a story tailor-made to introduce a fictional saviour figure, a mythical hero who will change Isa for good.
That is where Barroz comes in, the guardian of De Gama’s treasure, a loyal servant to an old viceroy of Goa. To me, the emotional core of the film is the inherent tragedy of this character. Barroz has been waiting four centuries for his master to return, in the hope that he will be reunited with the little girl he helped bring up. It's a play on the classic reincarnation drama but with a twist.
Yet, strangely, Barroz does not want to explore this angle. Instead, it turns into a film so obsessed with shocking you with its 3D pop-out shots, that it forgets that it needed real emotions and characters to draw you in. The frames, the mood and the colours are all in service of technology. There’s a flatness to the film’s texture, especially when it’s set in the present time, that it reminds one of titles made decades ago. The staging too, in its effort to force a 3D effect shot in there somewhere, slows it all down in the middle of a scene. The timing feels awkward, and it feels like the actors are pausing, just for a finger to be pointed towards us and for the viewer to go wow.
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But, if the film’s only USP was going to be its 3D format, shouldn’t the makers have thought of original visuals for it? No such luck here—what we get are the same shots of food being thrown at the screen or the visual of scary bad guys staring straight at us. There’s no use of technology to create the illusion of depth or the notion that we are participants in the action.
Perhaps the makers have forgotten that this technology isn’t as novel as it used to be, back when My Dear Kuttichathan released. In those days, televisions were still a luxury, let alone cable TV or the Internet. Banking so much on 3D to make it impressive, at a time when even films like Avatar: The Way Of Water (2022) failed to impress large sections of the audience, speaks a lot of how it’s next to impossible to captivate someone with tech alone.
Which is why you find it frustrating that the film never invests in its emotional arcs. During a particularly fascinating stretch, we see Isa being magically blessed with the ability to sing. We see musical notes floating in thin air as she sings and for once, her confidence impresses her father. It’s a scene that changes how we look at Isa, but instead of holding onto her emotion and the changes this has brought out, the film quickly moves on to the next conflict, abandoning the connection we feel with Isa.
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Even the earlier portions in which the film played out like a live-action cartoon are soon forgotten for the film to focus on Barroz and his back story from 400 years ago. The details become too foggy all too quickly when we get here. Apart from the idea of Barroz waiting for his beloved Isabella, we get the angle of a black magician trapping him, Isabella's greedy father, and another sub-plot about a museum guide trying to create trouble.
But for a film meant for children, why is everything so convoluted and complex? Barroz tries to juggle so many issues that it conveniently resorts to pages and pages of stilted exposition to explain what we're seeing on screen. The results aren’t healthy, and the performances, especially those of the foreign actors, don't add up either.
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It eventually turns into an indulgent exercise that is so in love with its technology, that it forgets the simpler things that mattered to us as children—back when we watched the classics Barroz borrows generously from. I went in expecting to be reminded of the day I watched the re-release of My Dear Kuttichathan, but I came out remembering the day I saw Kochadaiiyaan (2014) instead.