Oru Kidayin Karunai Manu (OKKM) is a very simple story that revolves around a death and a group of villagers who are unfortunately involved in it. The entire story is in fact narrated during the title card even before the first scene is played; a gutsy and confident move, believing in the screenplay. The very first scene strikes you as the camera angles are shown from the eyes of a goat.
How would a goat react to people’s problems? Will it take sides? Will it be judgemental? No! Similarly, the director has not taken any sides, has not tried to talk about a social issue or attempted to convey a message through the film. How would a set of people react to a given situation? How few members try to make use of the complicated scenario? These things form the basis of OKKM.
Director Suresh Sangiah has captured a story not trying to be smart by feeding his thoughts or adding many unnecessary cinematic elements to it. Having said that, it is not a docudrama, it has comedy, it has songs but they travel like water in the river. There is so much of satire that is drawn from our day-to-day life. Not many filmmakers try searching for such humor. Suresh Sangiah has tried his best to bring out humor from people’s life which has worked to a good extent.
The film does not follow a standard narrative pattern and that is where Suresh’s screenplay scores. However, you could experience a slight lag in pace towards the pre-climax portion which could have been tweaked a little. Emotions captured in the film largely look real which is one of the biggest strengths to OKKM. The dialogues sound so rooted and pitch perfect for the story. Nice to see good work behind the dialogues department. However, one character sort of annoys people with repetition of same verse over and again.
Despite being the debut film of dubbing artist Raveena Ravi as heroine, her name is credited first in the title card. She makes a decent debut but one could not judge her acting skills based on this performance. Though she travels throughout, still she does not have enough scope to prove her mettle.
Vidharth deserves a pat more than one reason. Firstly, for being generous to let go the first slot in the title card this is generally reserved for heroes. Then mainly for not interrupting the director from what he wanted to portray. He doesn’t get to play a typical heroic role; it is a role that is filled with imperfections with grey shades. The term grey shade could easily be misinterpreted for baddie. It’s not that, by grey we mean being a typical human; how one reacts to tough situation; how our brain asks us to be an escapist when the going gets tough. That is human tendency and that feeling is beautifully captured by the director.
Be it George or other supporting actors, they are as important to the story as much as Vidharth and Raveena. So not just the leads, every single person need to act well to bring out the emotions. But most faces are hardly known and to extract the kind of acting from them like how Suresh has done deserves a round of applause. There are dialogues that are hard to recite, it belongs to a particular slang (Maybe it is slightly easier for the localite) and it is also fast but each character has done justice to it.
The film does have a baddie but till the very end, his motive is never established. Was he money minded? The hero does establish in one of the scenes that the character is angry at him for some reason. But those are petty reasons. Was there a family feud or was money the only motive? If so would someone wait for years to reap for it? These are the questions that a common man would ask the director who had left the reason open-ended.
With regard to the technical aspects, you cannot pinpoint a particular score and say that was magnificent because the script does not need such a magnificent score. It needed a simple sound that doesn’t disrupt the narration which was adequately provided by music director Raghuram. The idea to start the film through the eyes of a goat was so well conceived by cinematographer Saran and even otherwise he has given what the story demands through his lens.