‘Pani’ movie review: Joju George’s gory drama works despite its typical revenge plot

When a gruesome murder happens in broad daylight at the beginning of a film, one expects the murder to be the major event around which everything else will revolve. But Joju George’s Pani really takes off from a smaller fight that Don (Sagar Surya) and Siju (V.P.Junaiz), the two murderers, get involved in at a supermarket later in the day.

In the few sequences leading up to that supermarket incident, we realise that something has changed in the two, novices in the world of crime, heady with the excitement over the money that they were about to get from their first hit. They have tasted blood and now there is no going back. Only that, this time, their paths cross with that of Giri (Joju George), part of a mafia syndicate that is ruling over Thrissur city. But the animal instincts that had kicked in would turn the two into hunters, rather than the hunted.

Joju George, in his debut as a screenwriter and director, hinges the entire film on this peculiar mindset that dictates their every step. Even though Pani, at its surface, appears to be a typical revenge story, it is this focus on their unpredictable behaviour which drives the film. No fortress seems secure, no one too big to be stricken down. They appear to be aware of this dynamic, when one of them tells the other that they can easily see the big family and their syndicate while they are too small to be spotted.

On the other hand, the mafia syndicate’s inner dynamics are deftly painted, giving us a sense of how all of them came together in college and ended up as a family. Giri and the characters played by Prashanth Alexander, Bobby Kurian, Sujith Sankar and Abhaya Hiranmayi, who make up the gang, all appear to be at the kind of ease with each other that can come only from years of hanging out together. The intensity of Giri’s relationship with his partner Gowri (Abhinaya) is also conveyed in a few scenes, providing emotional depth to what follows.

The syndicate is presented as maintaining a peaceful exterior, having grown big enough to delegate the dirty work to their minions spread out all over the city. With their people in the right places, including their cousin Kalyani (Chandini Sreedharan) as the ACP, they could maintain their respectable positions in society as builders and real estate dealers. They clearly have their share of crime behind them, but the film presents the scheme of things in such a way as to make us root for them.

Joju, as the writer and the director, has quite a hold on the progression of events which keeps coming at almost the right pace and timing. A rivetingly staged car chase is placed we;; before the climax, leaving a bigger blast for later. Some of the blood and gore can be a bit hard to handle for certain viewers. So are the needlessly graphic scenes of sexual assault. The use of sexual assault as one of the reasons for men to take revenge in yet another film came as a disappointment.

In his directorial debut, Joju delivers a gory, well-executed drama which works despite the run-of-the-mill revenge story at its core.

Pani is currently running in theatres