Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam - A fantasy in reality

Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, written & directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery, is yet again a refined craft from Malayalam Cinema. How could someone, with ease, just write a simple drama with a fantasy element and make it engaged throughout the runtime? And the answer is Lijo Jose who makes it intriguing with an astounding conceptualization of the idea and put it into his style of writing, in which S. hareesh's screenplay plays a significant role. The story revolves around an event when James walks out of the van and became the identity of Sundaram in an unknown village of Tamil Nadu while all of his family and relatives return from a pilgrimage trip. Nanpagal Nerathu Mayakkam is all about James, a Malayali Christian who is an ordinary family man shifting his identity to Sundaram, a runaway person from an interior village in Tamil Nadu, who fits himself into the family and the village. Lijo Jose handled this simple concept with a brilliant screenplay and visualizations. The scenes are well crafted with long shots where the actors are given more time to breathe in the characters and perform them on-screen with thorough efficiency. The audience can easily experience the variations in the character of James after becoming Sundaram, Mamooty delivered a fantabulous performance in his own style. The transformation part of the character James is very handled with intriguing details in the characterization - they tried to show the difference between the two characters of James and Sundaram in a very subtle way and it worked very well on the screen. Nanpagal Nerathu Mayakkam has two UPS to itself, one is the concept of the movie and the other one is Mamooty's performance - he is kind of a beast on screen but his subtle expressions to the sequences make the scene very well crafted. The Tasmac scene where he enacts himself as Shivaji movie is the most interesting sequence in the movie and the one before intermission where he fights for himself in the middle of the road is another epic performance from Mamooty to the film. 

The story also carries a light-hearted emotion which can be seen when the whole family awaits the return of James in the same village - it is where the director as the writer himself tries to present the unity among the different classes in society, in one of the scenes, the elder person of the village express that we are same and see no difference between the people from a different state. There is no background music composed for the movie - the director went with the idea of conveying the emotion of music in a different way where there will be old songs and television programs running behind the scenes in any of the sources like TV or Radio. Also, it connects and conveys the emotions that are going on in the scene with the characters. An important element of the movie is the dark humor - it worked very well in the movie where it totally changes the mood of the scene. The cinematography of the movie helped to elevate the visual aspect of the movie - Theni Eswar's angles with long shots and the static camera works make the movie be seen alive, he tremendously fits the shots in the wide to convey the world to the audience with his angle. The climax of the film is the open-end and it suits the concept of the film very well, Ligo Jose metaphorically ends the movie by giving two dimensions to the movie with the unanswered decision of the character.