Padakkalam

Four students are a group nobody at school takes seriously; they read comics, talk among themselves and go unnoticed in class. A new teacher arrives. With that arrival strange things start happening and the four end up in the middle of it. Events that cannot be explained upset the order of the school. The four try to apply the logic they learned from comics to a real situation, and that helps as much as it tangles things further. Manu Swaraj directs. Sharafudheen, Sandeep Pradeep and Suraj Venjaramoodu are in the cast. It is in Malayalam. The film is one of the genre experiments that have increased in Malayalam cinema in recent years; school comedy and supernatural elements are used together. The humour is built on the characters' incompetence and the heroic shape is broken deliberately. The supernatural strand needs no explanation; the film sets its rules early and then plays with them. Malayalam cinema drew attention in this period with small budget productions built on an idea, and this film belongs to that line. The school setting is used in detail and the supporting characters are part of the narrative. Its limit is pace; the plot scatters in the second half and some strands do not close. Who it is for: viewers who like Malayalam comedy and mixed genres. Who it is not for: the humour is local, the structure loose, and the resolution hurried.