There is no denying the fact that what happens in the last 15 or 20 minutes of the latest Shane Nigam starrer Dridam has something that we might not be anticipating. And what the hero does in that phase of the story justifies the title of this movie. Dridam is presented by Jeethu Joseph. And somewhere, I would say the graph of Dridam is similar to another creation that was presented by Mr. Jeethu Joseph, the recent JioHotstar series, Roslin. Both of these creations have a climax filled with twists, but unfortunately, the buildup to that juicy space is a laborious watch.
Vijay has taken charge of this rural police station in Idukki as the new SI. It is a police station with no major crime records, and when Vijay reached there, all the fellow police men were cordial, and it felt like a very comfortable space to work. But soon, a body is recovered from a nearby place, and following this incident, a robbery case also happens. All of a sudden, this newcomer is burdened with unprecedented pressure, and what we see here is how that character deals with that scenario.
In a way, I would say Dridam shows you how dialogue writing has an extreme importance in mounting thrillers. Dialogue exposition is something people like Syam Pushkaran and Bahul Ramesh have done brilliantly in Malayalam cinema. The way they pass necessary information with scope to interpret was the reason why we subconsiously invested in characters they had written. Dridam, written by Linto Devasia and Jomon John, clearly underestimates the audience. This was a problem I have seen in Jeethu Joseph’s last release, Valathu Vashathe Kallan, as well. The writing does not treat some of the police officers as people who received training before joining the police force. For almost 80% of the movie, you find yourself wincing at the kind of explanatory dialogue you are made to sit through. The kind of disinterest the movie creates through those portions is so bad that this unexpected climax couldn’t really salvage the movie.
Shane Nigam portrays the naivety of the character in a believable way through his body language. But when it comes to dialogues, the script is already against every actor, and Shane wasn’t able to render it in a way that sounded real. Shobi Thilakan plays a key role in the movie, and with his years of experience in dubbing, he was able to reduce the awkwardness in the written dialogues. Dinesh Prabhakar, Vinod Bose, Krishna Prabha, Kottayam Ramesh, Nandan Unni, and Saniya Fathima are the ones playing the other police officers. Bitto Davis, Abhiram Radhakrishnan, Prashanth Murali, Joji John, etc., are also there, playing minimal-length character roles.
Martin Joseph, the debut director, is not able to detect the stiffness of the script. If you look at the way Shane Nigam says dialogues, there is that news-reading kind of feel where you can easily understand that it is not the way someone speaks comfortably. So, making the necessary change to make the scene look organic is just not happening. Even the character design of the hero will make you wonder whether the hero has not even seen a film in his whole career. The things even someone who has not entered a police station can guess are new things to our SI hero. There are moments here and there that give us a hint about the twist in the climax. But the staging of those moments is somewhat deliberate, and hence, once we see the payoff, it is not really a surprise. Like I already mentioned, the dialogues make things too obvious at times, and there are moments where you would wonder who talks like this. The cinematography does some adventurous and impressive stuff in the climax portion, and that, along with the background score, elevates the movie considerably in the final moments, which has some violent stuff.
I have heard filmmakers themselves talking about the need to crack a good climax. There are times when a seemingly good climax can make you forget the bad stuff you endured before that. Dridam, in my opinion, is one such movie. At one point, I thought maybe the flaws in the dialogue were an attempt to unsettle us at a later point. But the fact that the lines maintained the same stiffness even in that relatively better climax gave me a clarity that it wasn’t deliberate. On the whole, Dridam felt like a poorly written movie that had the potential to be a true-blue suspense action thriller.
