Purusha Pretham review: Darshana Rajendran & Krishand give us a darkly funny, realistic police procedural

Darshana Rajendran plays the role of Susanna, an NRI whose husband has gone missing. (Photo: screen shot via YouTube/SonyLIV)

Super Sebastian (Alexander Prasanth) in Purusha Pretham is the kind of unreliable narrator who tests your patience and makes you want to tear your hair out. Sebastian is a policeman – but not of the efficient variety. Rather, he’s representative of the kind of policemen in real life who bungle their cases all the time. He lives with his abusive, wheelchair-bound mother and is romancing a woman whose police complaint he’s meant to be investigating. In his imagination, though, Sebastian is a rockstar cop, and that’s the version that he likes to project to those around him.

Directed by Krishand of Aavasavyuham (2022) fame, Purusha Pretham (written by Ajith Haridas and based on a story by Manu Thodupuzha) revolves around an unidentified male body that’s discovered in the wetlands of Kochi. Now this is a huge inconvenience for the police force – they vaguely feel bad for the dead man but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s now a headache for them. In a hilarious scene, cops from two different stations stand on either bank of the water body, hoping for the tide to carry the corpse in the opposite direction. From jurisdictional politics to dealing with superiors and family problems, Krishand humanises the police force even as they repeatedly fail to do their job.

If you want a one-line plot, Purusha Pretham is about how Super Sebastian finally gets his orange juice. People are always offering him lemon juice or some other beverage, but what Sebastian really wants is orange juice. He gets it only when he manages to crack the case of the John Doe. This is a police procedural, but not one focused on forensics or the painstaking efforts to put together evidence by serious, committed police officers. Rather, it’s a commentary on the police procedural itself, where ordinary, flawed humans have to somehow solve cases with strained resources. The screenplay, which shows a series of events, and then intercuts it with the visual of a document that summarises what just happened, creates a contrasting effect. You just watched all the behind-the-scenes drama, but here it is, reduced to a few dry lines that are relevant to the justice system.

Veteran actor Jagadish plays Dileep, a Dalit officer in the same station as Sebastian. The not-so-subtle ways in which caste pervades every aspect of a marginalised person’s life is highlighted, but the film neither treats him with patronising pity nor turns him into a glorified hero. Instead, the script invests Dileep with agency, and he’s also allowed to make his share of mistakes. Indeed, the strength of Purusha Pretham lies in its memorable character sketches for each police officer, without reducing them to a khaki blur. So, there is a cop who is also a TV serial star, a senior Tamil officer who takes pride in initiating health projects, a pot-bellied cop who claims it’s just gas (an enjoyable Jeo Baby), a strict woman officer who is getting engaged and so on. Others in the cast like Maala Parvathy and Pooja Mohanraj also leave a mark.

Darshana Rajendran appears as Susanna, an NRI whose husband has gone missing. The actor, who has proved to be a surprise package in her recent releases, is just as effective in Purusha Pretham. You never know if she’s a doe-eyed innocent or a cold, calculative femme fatale. Her brother Aby, however, is curiously underwritten. Perhaps this was deliberate, but in a film that offers so much rich detail for its characters, it feels like a misstep.

(Screen shot from Purusha Pretham)

Purusha Pretham gently plods through an investigation that seems to take forever – and in that, it mirrors real-life investigations that witness more bizarre twists and turns than what a fiction writer could imagine. It’s not the ruthless efficiency that we’re used to celebrating in crime films or web series, but a languid, messy unravelling that depends on luck and random events. While the screenplay may seem to meander into ‘unimportant’ story threads, asides and distractions, all of it is relevant to how the case is finally cracked. The zany background score never lets us forget the absurdist undercurrent in all that’s happening.

What do we make of the ending? In one scene, Super Sebastian is being pulped by another character while there’s a poster of Suriya from Singam (2010) in the foreground. The Tamil blockbuster is about a supercop who is the antithesis of Sebastian – he is who Sebastian pretends he is, but can never be. Still, Sebastian gets by, warts and all. That’s the film in one frame.

Purusha Pretham is now streaming on SonyLIV.