Padachone Ingalu Kaatholee Review | A Wannabe Satire With No Aim and Too Many Subplots

At the tail end of the movie Padachone Ingalu Kaatholee, a voice-over talks about how all the recent murders that happened in Kerala, which were based on superstitions and black magic, are dragging us backward. The disjoint nature of that commentary made me wonder whether the movie’s makers added that to give a structure to the film so that they could answer the audience if they asked what this movie was.

Dineshan is a school teacher, and he follows the left ideology. Things weren’t smooth for Dineshan, as bad luck made every step of life difficult for him. What we see in Padachone Ingalu Kaatholee is the drastic changes in Dineshan’s life when his girlfriend, who belonged to a right-wing family, suggests astrology as a solution.

The version I saw was approximately 150 minutes long, while the censor certificate of the movie showed a duration of 180 minutes. The bizarre part is even after almost 30 minutes of its footage getting chopped off, the movie felt like a pointless amalgamation of sequences that never blended with the narrative. There is a 5 minutes sequence in the film that shows one of the failed arranged marriage attempts of KK (the character played by Hareesh Kanaran), and it doesn’t really take much time to wonder why that sequence was there in the narrative. The number of useless distractions the script has in its attempt to narrate a simple, straightforward satire is countless, and that is the most tiring aspect of this movie.

It is really hard to imagine Sreenath Bhasi as a school teacher as one could hardly find any difference in his portrayal from most of his other performances as that arrogant guy. Grace Antony gets to play a character role that she pulls off convincingly with her talent. Ann Sheetal looks pretty, and the dubbing that gets the slang correctly has reduced the damage. Hareesh Kanaran has an extensive role in his typical style. The movie’s star cast is vast, including some cameos, and sadly, the writing was so bad that you would find it extremely difficult to remember any of them.

They say some fundamental things about the editing process, like finding a motive to cut, judging whether a particular scene is required or not, etc. Bijith Bala, who directed this film, is a renowned editor. And Kiran Das, who has edited this film, is one of the best editors in the industry right now. It really baffles me that both of them collaborated on a movie with too many pointless scenes, and even the narrative is unclear. From superstitions to the protection of the earth, the writing is all over the place with its agenda. And it uses the safe strategy of making the right-wing look like clowns and the left wing as a group that needs to be rectified.

Padachone Ingalu Kaatholee feels like a movie that was made based on a scribbled script. In the movie’s initial minutes, a very sexist joke is included in the narrative when a teacher talks about sexual harassment. When a worker from another state was introduced, they made a joke about their cleanliness. After all this, they had the audacity to discuss the renaissance in the climax.