You might be an hour or two late to the party. Still some will stick around, waiting to entertain you, or be entertained by you. But, what if you turn on after a week or even a day? alone Is he late to the party of pandemic films whose time has passed. Yet it makes a valiant attempt to engage and entertain, using some familiar tropes. This is an area where Shaji Kailas hasn’t ventured much, as the film sets up a world away from his usual loud, masala entertainer, though the script often makes its sole protagonist look as if he were a mass hero.
In the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, motivational speaker Kalidasan (Mohanlal) moves into the thirteenth floor of an apartment in Kochi. Locked inside the apartment, with no neighbors to talk to, Kalidasan begins to hear voices of a mother and daughter. While his friends, with whom he always talks on the phone, dismiss it as his drunken rumblings, he goes deeper to unearth the mystery behind the voices.
alone
Director: Shaji Kailas
Artist: Mohanlal
The whole setting of a single protagonist in a high-rise building during a pandemic, reminiscent of a Ranjith Shankar-Jayasurya collaboration sunny. But while that film was about slowly revealing the character and the myriad issues he landed in alone, we don’t learn much about the character, as the script is more concerned with the mystery of the voices. All we know about Kalidasan from his phone conversation is that he is a motivational speaker who can reform even a criminal and has a habit of getting involved in others’ issues to help them. Of course, it is only natural for someone like this to want to help unseen voices as well.
But Rajesh Jayaraman’s screenplay, which aspires to be a thriller, has only the necessary elements to be an interesting short film. This paucity of material is evident in its later parts when the mystery is almost solved, but the thin narrative is painstakingly pulled together to fill the runtime. As the producers realized that the mystery itself was overwhelming, they constructed a bizarre theory in the climax to explain the protagonist’s behavior; The film would have been better without that information.
Compared to most of his forgettable recent outings, Mohanlal is in slightly better form alone, but it still isn’t enough to keep viewers engaged for more than two hours. Both the timing and run-time of the film work against it.
alone is now playing in theaters