Rekhachithram

Vivek Gopinath had been suspended for gambling while on duty. He comes back and his first job is a closed file. Forty years ago a woman disappeared and she was never identified. There is one clue: she worked as an extra on a film set in 1985. Vivek looks for the records of that shoot. He asks what happened in the town while the film was being made. Old witnesses talk. The narrative goes back and the days of that set are shown. As it emerges who the woman was, the reason for what happened changes too. Jofin T. Chacko directs. Asif Ali plays Vivek; Anaswara Rajan, Manoj K Jayan and Zarin Shihab are in the cast. The language is Malayalam. The narrative places a real film's production inside the fiction; the 1985 Kathodu Kathoram is its ground and Mammootty had the lead in it. Mammootty makes a short appearance in the film, generated with artificial intelligence. It was made for between six and nine crore and took around fifty seven crore. The matter it treats is being left without an identity; the file closed because the victim's name was not known. The narrative alternates between two planes of time and the eighties section is built in detail. The film turns film history into material for an investigation, a premise new to Malayalam cinema. The explanation at the end is held long and the tension drops there. Its limit is the resolution; the ending is too tidy and the coincidences strain the narrative. Who it is for: viewers who like Malayalam thrillers and cold case narratives. Who it is not for: it is long, explanatory, and the ending easy.