Reel Life: The hunt and the hunted

At first glance, Martin Prakkat’s Nayattu, that dropped recently on Netflix, is a taut and terse thriller that scrupulously follows one of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite, recurrent themes—innocent man on the run—that he explored in films like The Man Who Knew Too Much, 39 Steps, Young and Innocent, North by Northwest etc.

Prakkat contextualises it deftly in election-time Kerala and very cleverly so in the world of the upholders of law, namely the cops. With a twist uniquely his own he turns Nayattu (that translates roughly as Hunt) into a tale of cops on the run from the cops and, in turn, the government and the media.

He begins by giving us vignettes of a day in the police station, in the homes of the cops and during the rounds in the official vehicle. There’s the mother of a young CPO Praveen Michael (Kunchacko Boban) whose health needs attention, ASI KP Maniyan’s (Joju George) daughter is preparing for a drama competition and lady constable Sunitha Krishna (Nimisha Sajayan) is getting harassed by her cousin and seeking the circle officer’s help to get around personal troubles.

All these various strands are tied up inventively against the backdrop of electoral politics. All along, the lead up to the elections plays out in the background. There is the talk of postal ballot, the many strategies to get the better of the opposition, about the chief minister denying ticket to his right-hand man, a minister settling the score with his rivals by getting a young man, who has had a secret rendezvous with the daughter, booked for a non-bailable offence. The false case on the innocent boy presages the larger trope that rings in later in the film.

But to begin with what we get to see is a picture of the guys in uniform who are low on self-esteem, ideals and morals. Cops are far from independent, rather blatantly compromised and emasculated in hands of the politicians. “Those who do good work, end up in trouble,” says the cynical Maniyan and we soon see the reality of it unfold on the screen.

Prakkat builds up the tension, scene by scene, moment by moment. An argument over spitting blows up, a Dalit leader gets arrested, the caste vote politics erupts and, in the midst of the protests, deals for college and land are struck. Parallel to it is a wedding, a night drive back home, an unforeseen accident, a dead man who happens to be the friend of the arrested Dalit leader and all hell breaks loose. Soon enough we find Maniyan, Praveen and Sunitha turning fugitives, on the run from the very force they belong to, with the Crime Branch close on their heels.

Prakkat’s offhand and cursory portrayal of the Dalit leader as an out and out hooligan is disappointing and uncalled for. Almost like holding a candle for the majoritarian privileged class. More so because the vote bank politics itself is spelt out in a winding than pointed and decisive manner.

What helps is that the film moves on from that, even if a tad too quickly. It gets a sense of urgency and relevance from the gameplay that it pivots on—how the outlaw cops become pawns in the larger political circus. It’s about cold, calculated, clinical and cruel crimes, of shifting blames, twisting the truth, manipulating and destroying evidence, unashamedly doling out injustice and using the media to create one false narrative after another.

Sounds familiar? Well, certainly so in our post-truth world in which facts are dismissed and overlooked but fake WhatsApp forwards are blindly believed in; where the criminals roam scot free while the innocent people get jailed for sticking to their ideals; where television news is less about reality and more about theatrics and perception building.

The empathy, at the end of the day, is reserved for the innocent cop who had always been so busy doing his duty that he could meet his new-born for the first time, only fifteen days after her birth and is unable to fulfil the promise of attending the competition his daughter had put her heart and soul into.

Would the government be answerable to him? Or continue to use him for its own needs? That indeed is a rhetorical question. In the world of politics, the common man is the biggest casualty.