Maranamass movie review: A few doses of ingenuity and a mix of idiosyncratic characters drive this film

Cinema has for long provided an endless supply of content for social media memes, but the flow appears to have reversed in recent years. First came the influencers with their massive online reach, bagging noticeable roles. Now, viral online content has begun seeping into screenplays, to elicit easy applause. For instance, in debutant Sivaprasad’s Maranamass, co-written with Siju Sunny, Suresh Krishna’s recent online image as the “convincing star” is used to the hilt in one of the many humorous passages in the film.

This “memeification” of screenplays is not necessarily a bad thing, especially in cases where it works like a charm. Incidentally, at the centre of Maranamass is Luke (Basil Joseph), a popular YouTuber and a self-proclaimed ‘sigma male,’ who has become a headache to the people in his neighbourhood owing to his public-spirited actions, like sticking wall posters of the panchayat president’s Internet search history or putting the local police station on sale to convey a point to the idle police officers. So it is not a surprise that when a series of killings of senior citizens takes place, the needle of suspicion points towards him.

Since Maranamass does not aspire to be an investigative thriller, the identity of the serial killer is thrown at us early on. He walks around in plain sight, with his weapon of choice – a specific variety of banana, which he stuffs in the mouth of his victims, a hilarious reference to the clues that killers in thrillers usually leave behind to tease investigators. The serial killer is just one of the many eccentric characters who come together to drive the film, which progresses from one crisply-written episode to the next, until it loses its pace a bit during a long sequence set inside a bus.

Joining Luke and the serial killer on the wild journey are Luke’s kickboxer girlfriend Jessie (Anishma Anilkumar) who carries around a bottle of pepper spray which becomes crucial in the narrative, a bus driver (Suresh Krishna) who is dying to get married, a bus conductor (Siju Sunny) who is still searching for his father who went missing decades ago, an old man who was thrown out of his home for being a sexual predator, a police officer (Babu Antony) who is devoting equal amount of time to look for his missing dog as well as the serial killer, and bus owner Kumaran Asan, a retired school teacher, who has named his vehicles ‘Veenapoovu’ and ‘Duravastha’.

With such a wide variety of characters, pulling off a coherent narrative is a challenge, which Siju Sunny and Sivaprasad manage for most parts. Even when some of the situational humour fails to land, they are quickly followed by ones that work, turning the film into an engaging watch almost all through. Basil Joseph and Rajesh Madhavan anchor the film with performances that require them to deviate considerably from their more frequently seen avatars.

With a few doses of ingenuity, a potent mix of idiosyncratic characters and a liberal sprinkling of humour, Maranamass treads a path of its own. 

Maranamass is currently running in Cinemas.