Pinneyum Movie Review

Story: An unemployed man who is dependent on his wife’s earnings finally finds a job in the Middle-East. But greed takes over and he does something which changes their lives forever.



Review: 'Pinneyum' is Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s directorial after a gap of eight years. Naturally, expectations are sky high, but whether the film meets the expectations is highly questionable.

Purushothaman Nair (Dileep) is an educated but unemployed man in his thirties, and the breadwinner of the family is his wife Devi (Kavya Madhavan), a school teacher. After repeated attempts, Purushothaman finally lands a job in the Middle-East and things look up finally for the entire family, consisting of Devi’s father, terminally ill brother and the couple’s six-year-old daughter. Purushothaman is shown as a meek person who accepts the jibes thrown at him from the family with humility. So far the film, set in a pre-mobile era in a small village, moves in a typical ‘Adooresque’ pace, though some of the scenes and dialogues seem straight out of a play.

All of a sudden, Purushothaman does something totally uncharacteristic of such a person, apparently overcome by greed. In fact, the move is totally uncharacteristic of the film as a whole, more on the lines of a badly made commercial film. There is a murder, a cover-up and an investigation, and it just goes downhill from there. The focus of the film is apparently on the changes that the different events bring about to the relationship between the couple, but the outdated and predictable plot unfortunately reduces the film to some kind of a farce eventually, and the emotional scenes start to make the audience cringe.

Dileep and Kavya Madhavan present subtle performances and can be considered the only saving factors of the film. Nedumudi Venu, Vijayaraghavan and Indrans also do their parts well. However, with regard to the two teenage actors in the movie, the less said, the better. There is nothing incomprehensible to a lay viewer in Pinneyum, but the intensity and sub-texts one looks forward to is also missing.