Trance

Viju Prasad gives motivational talks in Kanyakumari and nobody listens. After losing his brother he leaves everything and goes to Mumbai. Two businessmen find him there. The offer is this: we will write you a past, make you a preacher, and you will perform miracles on stage. Viju accepts. Under a new name he starts appearing on television; the crowds come, the money comes, and faith turns into an industry. Then something happens during a live broadcast and Viju is lost inside the thing he made. Anwar Rasheed directs; Vincent Vadakkan wrote the screenplay. Fahadh Faasil, Nazriya Nazim, Soubin Shahir, Vinayakan, Gautham Vasudev Menon and Dileesh Pothan are in the cast. It is an Indian production in Malayalam. The matter it treats is the trade in belief; the film shows the miracle performances step by step as a production process. Fahadh Faasil plays the character like two separate people; the man on stage is not the man in the room. The film takes no position against religion; what it aims at is not faith but the order selling it. In the second half the narrative moves to mental illness and the tone changes sharply. The images and the sound design are deliberately suffocating; some scenes are hard to watch. The film had a long production and took years to reach cinemas. The narrative does not rest directly on real events but describes a familiar arrangement. The ending offers no close and leaves the viewer in the middle. Its limit is balance; the narrative is long, the second half falls apart, and the ending is contested. Who it is for: viewers who like Malayalam cinema and hard drama built on performance. Who it is not for: it is long, suffocating, and the ending unresolved.