Thallumaala

Wazim fights. The reason does not matter; a look, a word, a misunderstanding is enough. His fights are filmed on phones and spread online. One day he meets Fathima, a well known video blogger, and something starts between them. But the footage of his fighting keeps spreading too. A fight ruins a wedding, a wedding starts a feud, and the feud produces more fights. The film does not tell this in order; it mixes the events and gives them in pieces. Khalid Rahman directs. Muhsin Parari and Ashraf Hamza wrote the screenplay. Tovino Thomas, Kalyani Priyadarshan, Shine Tom Chacko and Lukman Avaran are in the cast. It is an Indian production in Malayalam. The film came out in 2022 and took fifty crore rupees worldwide. The narrative does not follow a straight line of time; the sections come out of order and the connections are made afterwards. The matter it treats is male pride; the fights are about being slighted rather than about evil, and the film mocks that. The fights depend on choreography and music; the narrative stages them as performance. The film takes social media as a direct subject and makes the spread of footage part of the plot. The colour and the editing are deliberately excessive; the narrative is built on speed. The woman does her own work and is not passive inside the story. The ending closes on a fight. Its limit is structure; the narrative is scattered, the characters shallow, and the noise constant. Who it is for: viewers who like the new strain of Malayalam cinema and games with form. Who it is not for: it is scattered, loud, and the ending light.