10:30 AM Local Call, Thank You, Happy Journey, and Rajesh Pillai’s last film, Vettah, were the scripts written by Arunlal Ramachandran. If you look at all these movies, there is a thriller element evident in most of them. After almost a decade’s break, he comes back to Malayalam cinema as a director, and interestingly, Arunlal has opted for a light-hearted fantasy film titled Sukhamano Sukhamann as his directorial debut. The not-so-amusing yet enjoyable humor is making the movie passable in the first half. However, when the movie reaches the second half, even though solutions aren’t something we haven’t seen before, the way it addresses loneliness is somehow making you root for the character. On the whole, Sukhamano Sukhamann is an unsurprising package that has the qualities to be a comfort watch.
Theo is a loner who lives alone in his house. His lack of connection with people has made him a laughing stock among his neighbors, who call him mental. One fine day, something absurd happens, and Theo was able to talk to an oldman’s ghost. Theo assigns him the position of his grandfather. What we see here are Theo’s efforts to build a family using the special power he has acquired overnight.
The idea here is to tap into this emotion of loneliness. Our central character is someone who became lonely at a very young age, and he is craving those intimate connections like family and friends. There is a sense of basicness to the writing and its presentation in the earlier parts of the movie. When the fantasy elements start to make the story interesting, you can predict what would happen. The fact that we are also rooting for someone who wants people to die is really funny on a conceptual level. Despite the predictable and cheesy elements in the second half, I think the movie managed to place certain elements that would somehow tap into the lonely moments everyone may have gone through, and I believe that’s the reason why it feels like a comfort watch.
With the introduction of the fantasy element, the movie could have gone the easy way of the hero fixing all his voids with this special power. But Arunlal has this plan to give something real to the main character. The script is somewhere building and shaping characters for that purpose. The verbal motivation is a little too on your face. If you look at the backstories of most of the key characters, there is a sense of familiarity to all that. After giving us multiple moments that we can see in any escapist romantic comedy, the film places a slightly harsh twist to bring the hero and us to a reality where the hero starts to build something real with someone who also needs something real. That character arc somewhere makes you like the idea despite the numerous generic beats. The songs in the movie, especially the emotional ones, enhanced the feelings of the characters.
Mathew Thomas, as Theo, gets to play this underconfident character who isn’t faking confidence. The innocence he carries in moments where he doesn’t need to talk much is helping the movie add a layer of subdued pain to that character. Jagadish has been showing a different aspect of his acting style ever since he started doing these senior characters in movies, and in this film, you can see him elevating a regular character into something else. There is a moment in the film where he walks into a hospital room to see a baby, and the staging of that scene is a little too dramatic and can make you question its logic. But the way Jagadish delivers the one small line in that moment was so good that you only focus on the emotion. Devika Sanjay gets to play a character whose attitude and arc have certain similarities with her character in Njan Prakashan. And the performance had the charm it required. Noby Marcose’s character and the jokes written around that character will remind you of the movies that were released almost a decade ago. For the sake of humor, they have included multiple characters and the actors who performed those parts, Sphadikam George, Kudasanadu Kanakam, Abin Bino, etc., were fine in their respective roles.
Sukhamano Sukhamann is a movie that approaches its fantasy elements superficially and the emotional elements with controlled cheesiness. With a runtime of one hour and forty-seven minutes, the film has no intention of beating around the bush to get to the point. With the actors grounding the story and adding a palpable emotional coating to it, Arunlal Ramachandran’s movie is a passable, relaxed, fun watch.
