In a film titled Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (prima facie culprits), you’d wonder why its writers spend so much time introducing the police officers. When we first meet Aleena (Parvathy), we’re told that she has lost her husband and that she’s being given his job in the police force on compassionate grounds. She has a baby girl, and it appears that she has no one else to live for except her daughter. In the new station where she takes charge, we also meet Divya (Unnimaya), a senior constable who hasn’t yet been able to conceive a child despite multiple attempts. As for Dasan (Siddharth Bharathan) and Sreenath (Mathew), both of them are on the cusp of starting their respective lives after years of waiting.
Everything about these officers and their police station spells out their ordinariness. We catch them picking fights with the egoistic senior officer, and we see them going through their mundane duties without the righteousness of the kind police officers movies are made with. But this is only until these fallible officers collude to make a mistake that’s bigger than all of them. By this point, though, these four have become very real people in our minds, and even their wrongs begin to look a lot like muddy truths to us.
It’s this thin line between morality and law that makes Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar such a fine film. Everything that’s supposed to go wrong eventually does but we’re not exactly in the company of a mastermind like Georgekutty from the Drishyam franchise. These four, despite being officers themselves, aren’t exactly experts at manoeuvring the system they are are a part of. But even so, they know just enough about the gravity of their actions and what’s awaiting them.
It’s at this point that we're introduced to a superstar police officer named Harris Meeran (Vijayaraghavan). If these mentioned leads don’t seem worthy of a "police film", Meeran is the very definition of the kind of officer such movies are made for. It’s when these two opposites collide that we get a stunning procedural that’s all about the good cops taking on the best cop.
This is also where Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar turns into a peculiar police procedural in which there’s no limits to the detailing. Since both aides are occupied by trained police officers, you do not expect the tricks you see from a criminal no matter how trained they may be. There’s an imminence to the trouble that lies ahead and the culprits in question aren’t trying to escape law as much as they’re trying to bend them to their convenience. This includes minor ideas like the manner in which a mobile phone is handled to deceive the investigating officer. But at its height, these culprits are also clever enough to come up with schemes that may escape the minds of even the most thorough criminals.
Yet none of these feel like the moves of a team that has it all planned out. A mistake feels just an inch away and that adds to a constant feeling of tension as you watch the film. What adds even more depth to this narrative tension is a character like Meeran who deserves a mini series of his own.
He starts off as a respected officer who plays by the book, but we see this case slowly chipping away at his integrity. As is the case with any great police procedural, ego comes into play and so does the hierarchical embarrassment that comes from having to take on officers many years his junior. Just as their ordinariness makes Aleena and his team formidable, it’s the stardom that comes with being the perfect cop that works against Meeran’s judgement.
Director Shahad and his writers PS Subramanian and Vijesh Thottingal give us a hyper realistic procedural that doesn’t allow us any time to rest or the notion of hope. With actors like Parvathy and Vijayaraghavan in forms like never before, we see them dissolve into morally complex characters. Through incredible writing, we get a nerve-wracking film in which everyone’s morality is dubious, but we're happy to pick a side. No matter how much we’ve figured it out, the movie always remains several steps ahead of us.