'Pravinkoodu Shappu' Movie Review: A Few Sparkling Moments in an Otherwise Dull Mystery

Director: Sreeraj Sreenivasan
Cast: Basil Joseph, Soubin Shahir, Chandni Sreedharan, Chemban Jose Vinod, Shabhareesh Varma
Writer: Sreeraj Sreenivasan
Language: Malayalam

Nothing about Pravinkoodu Shappu (the toddy shop at Pravinkoodu) is normal. Right from the baby-faced-milk-gulping police officer investigating a major crime to the peculiar characters involved in it, everything is dialled up by a notch or two. These are neither people we’ve seen before, nor do they behave in rational ways you’d expect them to in a murder mystery. Sreeraj Sreenivasan is so good at building a world for this story that we forget to notice that his film isn’t really going anywhere.

Let me explain by breaking down the introduction scene of the police officer, Santhosh (Basil being Basil). He’s said to be brilliant at his job, someone who has a record of solving cases in under 10 minutes, that too, without using brute force. He can assume how long a lady has been in a marriage, just by looking at her necklace. When we meet him first, he does not want to take up the case at the Pravinkoodu toddy shop because he associates the smell of toddy with childhood trauma.

All of this, including a vivid suicide scene, is shown to us in the first half hour of the movie, yet the tone is anything but serious. Jokes keep popping up within this seemingly eerie setup. 

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We’ve been told that a powerful man named Babu has been found hanging right at the centre of his toddy shop and it is most likely to have been a murder. The killer could be anyone, including his employee Kannan (Soubin Shahir) who is miffed that his wife is having an affair with Babu. It could also be any one of the many people Babu has already upset in this locality.

So much time is spent introducing these characters and their backstories that there’s a fatigue that sets in as we wait for the film to get to its point. Take the example of childhood trauma that haunts Santhosh and what it adds. This information is fed to us at such an important point in the film that we assume that it will hold some overarching relevance. Of course, the character speaks about it in a couple of instances but there’s nothing that adds to our understanding of either Santhosh or the film.

From 'Pravinkoodu Shappu'

The same can be said about a giant subplot that connects Santhosh’s father to Babu. The moment these two characters are mentioned, it should have amounted to something, but it is merely added into the screenplay as a detail, or one more “peculiar” quirk. You’d understand this bit of overwriting if such points had worked as a red herring—but that doesn’t seem to be the case either.

Instead, the film doubles up into a second investigation in which the investigating officer himself is brought under the radar. By this point, it’s easy to feel confused enough to be removed from the film, but you stick around because Pravinkoodu Shappu manages to surprise you with a few moments of inspired comedy.

Like a hilarious fight sequence in the police station in which the mellow Santhosh explodes to beat up a man for the first time. Or a brilliantly shot bike chase in which Santhosh tries to get to a crime scene sporting a pair of boxers. The comedy in both these instances is shamelessly slapstick but these are also the rare moments in which the film comes alive.

This is disappointing because it’s tough to find fault with any technical aspect of the film. Cinematographer Shyju Khalid works overtime to give this film a burnt-out texture, the sort you’d expect in a dark and grungy graphic novel. Vishnu Vijay, the film’s music director, understands his assignment as well to create quirky tracks like ‘Clever Clever’ that cannot be used in any other film.

Despite all these individual aspects working so well, it never comes together because of the film’s odd writing decisions. Which means that even when we’re waiting to discover who committed the crime, we feel the film getting derailed because there’s just too much happening. Even the way the final detail is revealed is so abrupt and random that it makes you feel short-changed for investing in a thread that amounted to nothing. It remains watchable for its world-building, technical finesse, and quirky characters but with its lack of focus, Pravinkoodu Shappu gets lost in translation.