'Nellikkampoyil Night Riders' Movie Review: The Mathew Thomas Film Tries To Mask Obviousness With Quirkiness 

The writers of Nellikkampoyil Night Riders must have grown up watching reruns of shows like Scooby-Doo and Courage: The Cowardly Dog. The influence is obvious, and so is the treatment. We’re taken to a village at the start, and instead of centring the film around one haunted house, we’re told the entire village is haunted. It’s a decent setting made better thanks to its early 2000s timeline and a group of stereotypical characters we no longer see in our films.

This includes a retired army man with a drinking problem, a village healer with mantras for every calamity and a village gossip with yet another drinking problem. Even our protagonist Shyam (Mathew Thomas) has a problem of his own, but not linked to the bottle. He witnessed a relative dying by suicide when he was five, and continues to be haunted by her visions in the dark. Incidentally, these horrifying visions couldn’t have affected him at a worse time; his girlfriend, Dhanya (Meenakshi Unnikrishnan), is home alone, and she begs him to pay her a "conjugal" visit. But with his visions and the news of a horse-legged spirit on the loose, Shyam figures that these visits are perhaps closer to a setup right out of The Conjuring. 

It’s a thin plotline that could only have been saved in execution. Director Noufal Abdullah tries his best to create the illusion of a mysterious village and a scary, unwanted visitor, but there’s only so much he can do. We sense a pattern in the screenplay early on, and after the initial curiosity, the movie enters a space of redundancy. This pattern involves this horse-legged creature attacking one villager after another. Jump scares are thrown in too in generous measure, but there's nothing more to these set pieces. Even Shyam’s personal battle with his past does little to make him a complex character. 

The makers perhaps saw this coming and tried to make up for this lack of depth with quirkiness. So, we get Shyam breaking the fourth wall to speak directly to us. At some point, this tool is abandoned, and we hear Shyam’s buddy and his voiceover guiding some scenes. When this idea runs out of steam, we get several scenes in which Shyam is forced to deliver a joke or two under his breath, as though the scene itself isn’t good enough to hold its own. 

It’s as though the makers felt deeply limited by the performers and forced them to squeeze in one-liners at the dubbing studio as an afterthought. But these scenes feel too empty and plain to hold our interest. Even the two-hour runtime feels long, and despite all the effort to make the film look interesting, we have sequences that play out exactly like how you expect them to. The mystery machine-like auto rickshaw or the inherent weirdness of this gang doesn’t help things either. A tribute to a show as classic as Scooby-Doo deserved to have more bite.

Watch the film's trailer here: