Who knew that some of your favourite Malayalam songs (even the feel-good ones) could be associated with disturbing images of murder, uncomfortably menacing atmosphere and nail-biting tension? Filmmaker Vipin Das has pulled off precisely that with his new film Antakshari, and to brilliant effect, I must add. The title evokes a fun, pleasing game of music, but the film uses this game to register the exact opposite reaction. Yes, it is fun, alright, but of the terrifying kind. Antakshari also indulges in another act of association: a motor vehicle is made significant in a way that no other vehicle-centric thriller has done before.Antakshari 2022 Movie Download
And when you add a host of stand out characters and sub-plots, the result is an ingenious masterwork of suspense that should please genre enthusiasts.Antakshari does something interesting with its screenplay. It plays out images from the past and present simultaneously — and seamlessly too. This refusal to inform us of the timeline of each event works to the film’s advantage. It only lets us know which is which towards the end. With this approach, one naturally wonders why certain characters and events are introduced and then put aside for a while. But if you are patient enough to handle a little bit of meandering behaviour, you’ll find the film to be a rewarding experience. A while back, the Spanish filmmaker Oriol Paulo, who specialises in suspense, did something similar with his brilliant eight-episode series, El Inocente (The Innocent, 2021). While Antakshari doesn’t follow the exact same structure, it adopts a similarly introduce-ignore-reintroduce format to keep things intriguing. It takes a sufficient amount of time to immerse you in one character’s world before moving on to another and then another, before setting up the central puzzle and leaving us to figure out how everything fits in, right until the penultimate moment.Who knew that some of your favourite Malayalam songs (even the feel-good ones) could be associated with disturbing images of murder, uncomfortably menacing atmosphere and nail-biting tension?