2018

August 2018, Kerala. The monsoon comes heavier than expected, the dams fill and the gates are opened. The water takes the villages. The film tells no single hero; a young man who deserted the army, a fisherman, a taxi driver, an interpreter and a family each move separately inside the same flood. When the roads close the state cannot do the rescue alone. Fishermen on the coast load their boats onto lorries, bring them inland and take people off the roofs of their houses. Jude Anthany Joseph directs. Tovino Thomas, Kunchacko Boban, Asif Ali, Narain, Vineeth Sreenivasan, Aparna Balamurali and Lal are in the cast. It is an Indian production in Malayalam. The film rests on the real flood that struck Kerala in 2018. It was made for around twenty six crore rupees and took more than a hundred and seventy seven crore; on release it became the highest earning film in Malayalam cinema. India submitted it for the international feature award at the Oscars. The water scenes were shot largely on built sets and in tanks. The matter it treats is ordinary people organising themselves; the film builds the rescue on the fishermen. The narrative carries many characters and some of them stay shallow. The film steers with emotional music and some scenes are overdone. Faced with the disaster, the narrative dissolves differences of religion and class. The ending closes with real footage. Its limit is tone; the narrative slides into the language of heroism, it is long, and some effects are weak. Who it is for: viewers who like disaster films and adaptations of real events. Who it is not for: it is long, heavy on emotional pressure, and the ending weighty.