Thankam film review: A compelling police procedural with unexpected moments of comedy

Thankam released in theatres on January 26, 2023. (Image: Screenshot)

‘Curst greed of gold, what crimes thy tyrant power has caused’ wrote the great Roman poet Virgil who was born in 70 BC. The line may well be the driving force of Saheed Arafat’s Thankam, written by Syam Pushkaran. The film revolves around the gold trade and the underhand deals that are part of it; the metal they covet may be glittery, but there is a dark underbelly to the business.

Pushkaran is among Malayalam cinema’s best contemporary writers, and he gives us a compelling story that begins as a delve into the gold trade, transforms into an intriguing police procedural and ends as a homily. Kannan (Vineeth Sreenivasan), Muthu/Mathew (Biju Menon), and Bijoy (Vineeth Thattil David) are partners who manage a gold trade business that isn’t strictly aboveboard. Huge sums of money are involved, and while the three are thick as thieves, there is always a moment or two when their trust wavers. Beneath the laughter and bonhomie, there is an undercurrent of fear and betrayal.

Arafat’s deft direction of this closely plotted, slow burn plot is admirable.

There is nothing more comic than real life, and Thankam understands this. So, despite the grim theme, the film is frequently funny, laugh-out-loud funny. Biju Menon, especially, is a riot. The scene when Muthu and Bijoy meet a couple of sex workers says a lot about how the film has been conceived. Before this, we see Muthu in his house, his loyal wife serving him fresh idlis and beef. Muthu is a family man, but he’s also a philanderer. It is his usual practice to check in with Bijoy to a hotel in Coimbatore and meet sex workers there. You’d expect this scene to be sexed up, with titillating shots of the women. What we get instead is unexpected humour.
The scene is an admission that these men are far from perfect; they may even be worth your scorn. But it asks that you look at them as human – it is this that makes them bend to the ‘tyrant power’ that gold has over them, and if you trap them in the binary of good and bad, the film will be lost on you. This is a world where a policeman may demand a gold chain from you as a bribe but piously return the pendant alone which has the image of a goddess on it.

Thankam travels from Thrissur to Coimbatore, Muthupettai and Mumbai, and the locations shift from a grungy police station to the darkness of a theatre and the insides of a car. There’s a variety of languages spoken on screen – English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Malayalam – and the film weaves a lot of linguistic and cultural hilarity into the narrative. Girish Kulkarni, who plays a senior police officer from the Maharashtra police force, is fantastic as he grapples with the maddening case that has brought him to the land of thayir sadam (curd rice). In fact, the casting for each role is brilliantly done – be it the petty criminal Vicky or the ‘ethical’ Ambika Chechi who is one of the kingpins in the grey network.

Aparna Balamurali plays Kannan’s wife Keerthy. Though she has limited screen time, she makes her presence felt as the wife who knows many of Kannan’s secrets but suspects that there are more. Vineeth, who played the amoral Mukundan Unni to critical acclaim in Mukundan Unni Associates, once again flirts with crime in Thankam, but has a far more vulnerable face in this avatar.

(Screenshot via YouTube/Bhavana Studios)

Where the film falters is in the denouement. The unravelling of the crime reveals an unexpected answer; the surprise should have worked to the film’s advantage, but that doesn’t quite happen because the plot thread ought to have been dangled somewhere in the first two acts for us to connect the dots. Perhaps anticipating such a criticism, Pushkaran and Arafat have the characters vainly denying the truth and hoping for another, more satisfying conclusion.

This is real life, the writer-director duo seems to say, and real life doesn’t come with neatly tied up threads. The jigsaw doesn’t always fit. Still, the sentimentalism in these scenes feels like a tonal shift in the realistic language that it had thus far spoken. Bijibal’s background score, understated and appropriate till this point, also rises to hit a high pitch, disturbing the meditative potential of the final sequence.

Thankam is a thoughtful film – it deals with crime but there is very little blood; it deals with criminals, but they are not deranged gangsters; it deals with the police, but they are not infallible; it deals with sociocultural differences, but it doesn’t score political points. It is a vexing human drama that shrewdly understands that life is a tragicomedy, whichever role you may play in it.