Ullozhukku – My Flash Review!

Ace Tamil Filmmaker K. Balachander in his heydays used to make a lot of women-centric films. In such films, invariably the end will be contrarian.  It will be the lead woman who will call the shots and decide her path while inflicting an irreversible pain on the man/men who would have wronged her in life. In this Malayalam film Ullozhukku, (Under current) debutant director Christo Tomy attempts such a treatment to a poignantly written story about women, married life and of course death. And I am certain that if Balachander was alive today, he would have been proud of Tomy’s attempt.

The film is set in Kuttanad amidst the picturesque backwaters of Alleppey where day-to-day commute on a boat is nothing to be surprised or envied about. The focus of the story in the initial frames is two women – the mother-in-law played by a superb Urvashi and the newlywed daughter-in-law played by Parvathi Thiruvothu. From here on, the film is simply about the character arcs of these two women and a few supporting characters around them like Parvathy’s Dad, mom and Parvathy’s lover.

The freshly minted husband dies of an ailment which he has been carrying for long. His mother (Urvashi) is aware of this and yet gets her son married to Parvathy. Parvathy goes through the motions in an utterly unhappy marriage dealing with her sick husband while seeking emotional and physical attention from her Ex-lover. When the husband eventually dies pretty soon, the continuous rain and the ensuing floods prevent the burial and his onward journey.   Every passing day with the rains failing to recede and delaying the burial, there is a new revelation. Undercurrents are usually not visible from the surface. But here the undercurrents become glaringly obvious. Director Tomy has used the watery setting smartly to pitch the travel of these characters and their emotions in the course of a marriage and a death.

Tomy gets his casting pitch perfect. Urvashi as the mother-in-law is brilliant as her character travels through different resultant emotions while all along staying self-centred. In a few scenes, I could guess the lines she would come up with by just looking at her body language as she prepared to deliver the lines. Parvathy matches up with the brilliance of Urvashi all through. For Alancier, this role is a sleepwalk.

At 2 hours, the film is rightly timed, paced and cut. In the initial scenes, the Director doesn’t spend too much time in obvious explaining of the proceedings and lets the viewers realise what’s actually happening. The Director even uses the chanting of prayers before the dead body to convey the undercurrents in a scene. These directorial touches too reminded me of KB. The writing is almost flawless except for the character arc of the Ex-lover, which I thought was a bit contrived. The sudden shifts in the tonality could have been handled differently and yet the end could have been achieved.

It doesn’t look like a debutant director’s film. Were they waiting for heavy rains to shoot those rain-fury sequences and floods? They looked real. Apart from minor transition issues in the background sound design and syncing with the scenes, the film is technically very well made. The use of silence in the background score in key scenes instead of blaring and eerie music was very effective in conveying the emotions of those scenes.

I am told that the Director had earlier titled this film – Shavamadakkam (The Funeral). I am glad he opted for Ullozhukku which adds a poetic touch to the title while at the same time dealing with the main theme of the film which is the conflict between what’s on the surface and beneath.

I don’t give away spoilers usually. But here I have to, without which I cannot explain this nuance in storytelling. In the climax, as Parvathy gets into the boat with Urvashi and holds her hand, any other director would have shown a surprise in Urvashi’s face. But here Urvashi doesn’t react. It is as if was expected. It’s like finally, she won the battle of undercurrents!

Ullozhukku is a must, must, watch for those who like the OTT genre of Malayalam films. It is streaming on Amazon Prime.