'KA' movie review: A High-Concept Thriller Sans Style Or Guile

Director: Sujith and Sandeep
Writers: Sujith and Sandeep

Cast: Kiran Abbavaram, Nayan Sarika, Tanvi Ram, Achyuth Kumar, Redin Kingsley, Saranya Pradeep and others
Language: Telugu

Young postman Abhinaya Vasudev (Kiran Abbavaram) has a weird fixation: He loves to open letters written by and meant for strangers and live life vicariously through them. 

We are told he picked up the 'habit' many years ago while growing up in an orphanage, and has since then read thousands of handwritten notes, unable to contain himself even if he wanted to. Sometimes, he changes the contents of those letters if he thinks that the message inside is hurtful or damaging to the reader and sometimes, he also chances upon murder conspiracies that he could solve. It’s one of these that forms the crux of KA, a mystery thriller written and directed by Sujith & Sandeep.

Vasudev’s proclivity, however, is just one of the many narrative threads that the film ties together. Over 130 minutes, KA throws several ideas at us. It starts off as a suspense film in which the protagonist is kidnapped, placed under hypnosis and interrogated in a nondescript room by a masked man. It then goes back in time (the whole story takes place in the late 1970s) and assumes the personality of a syrupy romance set in the fictional village of Krishnagiri, which curiously grows dark as early as 3 in the afternoon. The romance soon gives rise to another mystery in which young girls from the village go missing, but before you wait for a new layer to reveal itself, the film tells us that everything is linked to that room and that interrogation. The problem, though, is that by the time you wrap your head around all of this, you are either perplexed or plain tired.

Even then, KA’s intriguing setup manages to keep you hooked till the end. Everything in the film seems like a product of design. If the proceedings inside the room between Vasudev and the man in the Rorschach-like mask are given the edginess of a prison-break drama, the story set in Krishnagiri is staged as a school play. For about 75% of the film, characters speak and behave as though caricatures of "village" life. The humour is loud and largely juvenile, the sets, including a market and a post office, clearly look like sets and the overall vibe of the place feels mawkish. But you sense that the directors probably want us to see the world the way Vasudev would from his wide-eyed perspective (considering that he is recounting the entire story after being hypnotized). An apparent lack of intent in the style, however, leads one to conclude that they might have just gone overboard in creating a sticky-sweet 'retro' world.

What they really strive for, though, is to consistently subvert our expectations and keep us guessing, as though we are walking hand-in-hand with the protagonist. Every time Vasu is made to go down memory lane, he realizes that his good intentions often had bad consequences, for which he is potentially paying the price today. Every time he feels that he has inched closer to figuring out why he has been held captive, a twist from his own subconscious completely throws him off. A new set of characters enter the fray in the latter half of the story, complicating things further, and as he continues to spiral out of control, he senses that the picture is much larger than it seems, and that he isn't alone in this 'karmic' journey of breaking free.

Kiran Abbavaram is the right fit to play Vasu because of how efficiently he channels the character’s innocence. His grip on the language and dialogue delivery needs polishing but the actor commits to the task wholeheartedly and is in his element throughout. It is a bit of a disservice to him, then, that he doesn't get an able partner to work with as most of the other characters are written without much depth or substance; the film’s 'school production' tone could be held responsible for this. Nayan Sarika as Satyabhama, his love interest, is given a small scope to perform, but the sheer denseness of the material and the way in which it meanders don’t let her shine. Talented actors Saranya Pradeep and Achyuth Kumar are underutilized in parts that have very little bearing on the story.

Ultimately, KA is a high-concept affair that doesn't fully realise its promise. It's a film that needed to be more self-aware and smart about how it treats its fascinating premise, and one could refer to Vivek Athreya's Brochevarevarura (2019) to highlight the significance of style and personality in filmmaking. Directors Sujith & Sandeep try their best to round up their ambitious endeavour but they are left with a bit too much to handle in the end. The concluding moments, which spell out the ‘purpose’ of the film, find a way to imbue some excitement back into the narrative but also make one wish that the rest of the film had been worthy of that payoff. This is one of those films in which not everything works, but it’s evident that an effort was made to try something new. If anything, give this film a shot for Sam CS’ electric soundtrack.