Abraham’s Offspring

“There was a time when we used to carry something home from the theatre after watching a movie,” Maggie said as we were driving home having watched the Malayalam movie, Abrahaminte Santatikal (Abraham’s Offspring). “Why are today’s movies so hollow?” She asked.

   “Can a movie reflect anything other than its times?” I answered. “But this one was not entirely hollow,” I added.

  “Is there anything you’ll remember tomorrow about this movie?”

   “I don’t think so. But the plot was brilliant.”

   The plot is what makes Abrahaminte Santatikal entertaining enough. The movie is just a thriller, a perfect drama. There is crime, fraud, deception, revenge: the usual ingredients of thrillers. But Abrahaminte Santatikal begins with a serial crime: nine murders committed by a religious fundamentalist. The way that murderer is caught before he commits his intended tenth murder is based on too tenuous a reason and it will fail to satisfy any intelligent viewer.

   Soon the entire plot changes and it has nothing to do with all those murders. There is a love affair and a murder. Who is the real murderer? That’s the question though one person is arrested with irrefutable evidences. You will sit and watch wondering all the while how this part of the plot is related to the previous part. Well, the script writer is intelligent enough to make a number of sudden twists at the end which come as interesting jolts to the viewer, with a neat link between the religious killings in the first part and the murder in the latter part. I found the twists brilliant. Too brilliant, in fact.

   Excessively brilliant plots stay far away from the reality. But the movie does make a point: our world has become too brilliant for the ordinary folk. Our world belongs to brilliant crooks. I think I won’t forget that message. But Maggie is not happy with that message.