Alone Review | An Insufferable Thriller Where Verbal Diarrhea Meets Radio Drama

The only logical answer I can think of on why a movie like Alone was made is that Antony Perumbavoor wanted to make the most of the set he made for Monster. Set in the same flat we saw in the Vysakh debacle, Alone is writer Rajesh Jayaraman showing off his vocabulary in the most annoying way. I remember Anupama Chopra asking Fahadh and Mahesh Narayanan, “what are you guys smoking?” as praise to Malayalam cinema during the promotional interview of C U Soon. If she watches Alone, she will repeat the same question, but the tone will be totally different.

Kalidasan, a man whose background is unknown, is our only protagonist. He has come to Kochi during the initial days of the lockdown. His girlfriend, Yashodha, has helped him in getting a flat. But once he reached that flat, supernatural elements started to scare him, and slowly he took it up as a challenge for himself to solve on his own. How he accomplishes that is what you see in Alone.

I actually feel proud of myself for the above-written paragraph. Because it is not easy to comprehend and summarize such traumatic experiences. The moment the car in which Kalidasan came to Kochi enters the apartment premises, Shaji Kailas gives you a big signal (KGF reference) that he is clueless. The drone shot camera goes through every narrow gap, and I am still trying to assign some meaning to every cinematography gimmick one can see in Alone. I never knew that when the central character of a movie has schizophrenia, the director, cinematographer and editor should incorporate schizophrenic elements in the treatment of the film.

Initially designed for an OTT release, Alone is actually an attempt to fool such platforms. I mean, they have only one actor and a location already in use for another film. You need only common sense to understand that this movie was not done with a locked script. You just can’t predict to which remark the hero will react. There is a sequence in the movie where Kalidasan gives Payasam to his neighbor as it is his birthday. Shaji Kailas gives deafening BGM along with slow-motion for the character for that random scene. The shot division and edit pattern of this movie are full of similar wild improvisations that just show you how clueless they were about this film.

It’s actually painful to say that a great actor like Mohanlal delivered a terrible performance. He is all over the place, and Kalidasan is practically Lucky Singh on steroids. The dialogues were so bad that even Mohanlal couldn’t polish them in dubbing. Manju Warrier, Prithviraj, Renji Panicker, Sidhique, Nandu, Mallika Sukumaran, etc., have lent their voice to this movie, and somehow I could visualize Prithviraj Sukumaran’s expressions on the other side of the phone.

Rajesh Jayaraman is trying to blend schizophrenia and vigilante justice to create a movie that will have this Shankar movie kind of impact on the audience. But this verbal diarrhea radio drama package is a dead-on-arrival table profit venture. The makers are only giving it a movie structure to sell it as a feature film.