It may be one of cinema’s greatest tricks that it can twist one’s line of thinking about a person or an incident just with the perspective it chooses to present, the framing, editing choices, or the background score used. Reading a basic news report on the incident of crime at the centre of Shahad’s Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar might make one assume a particular stand on the culprits, knowing the long history of this kind of crime in the country and the stories that can be made up to save them.

However, the film frames the incident, the events leading up to it, its aftermath and the people involved in such a way that not once do we wish for the culprits to be caught and punished. Of course, we have Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam (2013), in which we all collectively stood with those who committed the crime. The film also has quite a few parallels with Drishyam, but this one has very different concerns and approach to the crime.

For much of the film, we see the whole incident through the eyes of Aleena (Parvathy), who gets a job in the police department on compassionate grounds after her husband’s death and through her close-knit group of lower-rung officers, Divya (Unnimaya Prasad), Dasan (Sidharth Bharathan) and Sreenath (Mathew Thomas). Halfway through, we also see it from the perspective of Haris Meeran (Vijayaraghavan), a crime branch officer whom we know as one of the sharpest brains in the force. Despite our longtime habit of wishing for such invincible officers to crack tough cases, we wish for him to lose this one.

Shahad, who debuted with the forgettable coming-of-age drama Prakashan Parakkatte (2022), ups his game here by several notches, aided by a taut screenplay he co-wrote with P.S.Subramaniam and Vijesh Thottingal and top-notch work from cinematographer Roby Varghese Raj and music composer Mujeed Majeed. Although there are some conveniences that the writers resort to, these do not hamper what appears to be an organically progressing plot, which manages to keep us on the edge for much of the close to three-hour runtime. The ways in which the film uses a book written by one of the characters to further the plot is perhaps one of the highlights.

Amid the tense encounters inside the police station, where a good part of the film is set, the writers find space for some much-needed humour to ease the tension. These are so cleverly sneaked in and often have a bearing on the core plot that they don’t seem out of place in a thriller of this nature. Parvathy lends much-needed emotional depth to her character, which she plays with a convincing mix of the circumspection of a relative newbie in the force and the sure-footedness of someone who has a strong reason to survive, whatever the odds. On the other hand, Vijayaraghavan radiates awe as an investigator in front of whom even the perfect crime unravels.

Just when a number of police procedurals in Malayalam seemed to be following the same narrative beats, Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar injects the genre with some novelty.

Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar is currently running in theatres