In the interviews leading up to the release of Vismaya Mohanlal’s Thudakkam, it’s writer-director Jude Anthany Joseph spoke about how the basic concept of the film had been in discussion, as far back as 2020. There’s been a whole host of similar films that have released since, but there’s no denying the film’s obvious lack of sheen because it has hit screens after all of those films have released. In terms of its messaging alone, Darshana Rajendran’s Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaye Hey comes to mind, with recent releases such as Blast in Tamil and Maa Inti Bangaaram adding to an unignorable feeling of déjà vu. In first viewing, Thudakkam also feels like the most dated of these films, relying on a gratingly obvious amount of self-seriousness, as though it’s the first ever film to say what it’s trying to.
But what Thudakkam tries differently is how it mixes two broad sub-genres to tell one story about women empowerment. If the first half is designed like a stalker movie with an investigation of a missing person forced into it, the second half is broadly a home-invasion action movie. The fact that it feels like a carefully calculated launch vehicle for a superstar’s daughter, only dilutes the film further to take away the veracity of its message. In one sequence, Mohanlal plays an exaggerated version of himself to motivate Meenu (Vismaya Mohanlal), after feeling let down by a horrific incident. After a minute, his speech decidedly blurs the line between fact and fiction, and we suddenly feel like we’re listening in on a father speaking directly to his daughter. There are hollow words like “freezing point”, “finishing point” thrown in to make it sound legit, but the entire sequence feels too artificial and too calculative to add to the film’s organic flow.
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