My quest to carefully unearth quality movies hit a roadblock when I watched the Malayalam crime investigation thriller, ‘Anjaam Pathiraa’, directed and written by Midhun Manuel Thomas. Do not get me wrong. By no means am I implying that this is the worst movie I have seen.

I genuinely think Midhun’s intention was to make a riveting, absorbing movie, but sometimes too many themes and subplots can spoil the proverbial broth. The plot drags on, going from one rabbit hole to another, shifting gears and becoming more and more monotonous.

The protagonist Anwar Hussain (Kunchacko Boban) is a psychiatrist who lives with his wife Fathima (Remya Nambeesan) and young daughter. In addition to his psychiatric practice, Anwar, who is also seeking experience in criminology, serves as a criminologist with the local police. This position is the result of his friendship with a senior police officer, Anil Madhavan, played by Jinu Joseph.

Soon the city is hit with a series of murders. The victims in all cases are part of the police force. After the first murder, Anwar’s deductions predict that the murderer is a serial killer. The police ignore his theory, and sure enough, another police officer is murdered.

Realizing that they were wrong, the police department now trusts Anwar. A former patient of Anwar, a hacker, is brought into the team to investigate a mystery involving CCTV footage. (Talk about clichés!) It turns out that someone had hacked the cameras and the system’s cloud storage, deleting footage from the cloud for the previous three days and duplicating footage in files from three days prior to the previous three days for the previous three days. (Got it?).

However, despite the cops listening to Anwar, there is one more murder. There is public outcry as to when this will end, a sentiment shared by the audience too. Now the cops are looking for a hacker, and he is soon apprehended, thanks to Anwar, who deduces the hacker’s identity while playing with his daughter’s fidget spinner. A flashback reveals the motivation of the captured hacker, but then there is more time left in the movie.

Now that the CCTV part of the investigation is over, clues provided by Fathima put Anwar on a chase for some custom-made statuettes. This investigation leads to the sculptor of the statues, who has been blinded by the murderer and has been waiting for the cops to visit him. The sculptor tells Anwar and the cops that he made the statues for one person who may be the killer. It made me wonder why there was no report of this incident, and the cops find out details of this crime only from the blind sculptor’s doctor. Then there is another clue involving a prescription and hypnosis.

Conveniently, the murderer returns to the sculptor for another statue, and his identity is revealed, with all these clues. Well, there is still more of the movie left. The plot now moves to a flashback to narrate the backstory of the killer and his motivations. When the flashback ends, there is still more movie left.

Now that the murderer has been found, and we know his backstory, it is time to apprehend him. This takes another 15 minutes of the movie, but justice has not been served to everyone. Luckily, there is only 5 minutes of the movie, just enough time for a surprise and a message pertinent to the movie, but at this point, the movie has lost its audience.

It is a pity that this movie turned out to be a disappointment, despite great photography and good acting performances. As I have often said before, a thriller needs strong personalities. There is no fearsome villain, and Kunchacko Boban’s Anwar is a forgettable character who does not make an impact with the audience.

The murders at the beginning are repetitive, and one of them could easily be eliminated without any impact on the plot. The movie runs for 2 hours and 21 minutes and could have been made tighter by removing at least the first flashback and some more scenes. Honestly, the cat-and-mouse chase between the cops and the hacker was getting monotonous. A plot with three murders, a handful of clues, two flashbacks, apprehending the criminal, and then a climax for retribution was simply too exhausting and drawn out for me. Final verdict: Skip it! There are so many other Malayalam thrillers you could watch instead of this.