Nayattu Review

 

In our country the police forces have always been scrutinized on a constant basis for their involvement in discriminatory treatment of the fringe groups resulting in state sponsored killings. Martin Prakkat’s Nayattu tries to address police brutality and caste politics from the viewpoint of the cops unlike earlier films that have tackled the same through the traumatic experiences of the oppressed and marginalized. The film subverts the usual narrative by placing the police forces as the helpless, exploited lot who is caught unawares between the manipulative caste-based vote appeasement politics of the ruling governments and systematically oppressed who decides to stand up to their oppressors. Nayattu benefits from the writer Shahi Kabir, a cop himself who infuses a lived-in dynamic to the lives of police officers who in the hands of a lesser writer might have ended up being mere caricatures mouthing politically charged punchlines.

Nayattu revolves around CPO Praveen Michael ( Kunchako Boban ) who joins a new police station under a good hearted ASI Maniyan ( Joju George) who also happened to be in the past, one among the many people under the tutelage of Praveen’s deceased father who was also a cop with the force a long time ago. Praveen and Maniyan befriend quickly and the narrative kicks-off when one of their colleagues CPO Sunitha (Nimisha Sajayan) files a complaint against her cousin for stocking and following her around ending up in the station in the day before state elections are to happen. Maniyan and Praveen end up in a brawl with the accused, a prominent young figure of the Dalit union who are all present at the station after a series of mishaps leading to the young man’s arrest for manhandling officers on duty.

This pretty much serves as the inciting incident in the screenplay and what ensues is a deadly hunt initiated by the cops in search of Maniyan , Praveen and Sunitha who are on the run to evade capture prove their innocence to the state police and media. The movie sets up the caste identity of Maniyan , a Dalit officer who wishes to spend more time with family amidst over burdened work timings and support his daughters efforts to win big at the state arts festival for which they have been warming up for a long time. Praveen and Sunitha exchange the occasional glances and look but the director never wishes to take their relationship beyond the mutual reliance. Tension boils between the officers en route their escape attempts from the system sponsored manhunt aimed at framing the three officers for the drastic turn of events after a Dalit boy is killed in an accident.

Nayattu packs quite a punch and acts as an subversion of the usual survival thriller genre by placing it in a highly relevant political scenario and cleverly sidesteps the trappings of a being a biased one sided view of the working of the police system in our country and how the outcasts sections of the society are merely pawns in the larger games executed by the state to sustain power. The film tackles some heavy themes like caste oppression, vote bank appeasement politics and its dire consequences, cornering of the marginalized by those in power in pursuit of scapegoats in a system that denies basic human dignity and fair treatment. Martin Prakkat tries to use an on the nose visual que to sum up the movie in the closing images that of a blind lady accompanied to the voting booth by her son in the side offering a rather amusing analogy of the common man blinded by the system and powerful and left to vote for an administration that stopped caring or at least stopped pretending to do so a long time ago.