Officer on Duty

Harishankar is a police inspector who has been demoted. He was punished over an incident and now serves at a small station. He cannot hold his temper and things at home are not good either. A report comes in about a gang selling counterfeit jewellery; the file looks small. Harishankar starts looking into it. The chain lengthens: sellers, middlemen, a missing girl and an older file. As the investigation goes on it becomes personal and the man starts using his own methods. Jithu Ashraf directs; it is his first film as director. Shahi Kabir wrote the screenplay. Kunchacko Boban plays Harishankar; Priyamani, Jagadish and Vishak Nair are in the cast. The language is Malayalam. It opened on 20 February 2025 and reached a streaming platform in March; it runs a hundred and thirty seven minutes. Its budget was thirteen crore and it took more than fifty four crore at the box office. Shahi Kabir served as a police officer earlier and the institutional knowledge in his scripts comes from there. The narrative does not clear its hero; Harishankar's anger is not shown as a virtue. The action is short and hard; the cutting avoids exaggeration. Its second strand is family; the man's relation with his daughter crosses the file. Its limit is structure; the last section ties itself to a genre shape and the coincidences multiply. Who it is for: viewers who like Malayalam crime films and hard character drama. Who it is not for: the violence is explicit, the character repellent, and the ending returns to a shape.