Corona Papers movie review: Even Siddique’s gravitas cannot redeem Priyadarshan’s slipshod thriller

Cast: Siddique, Sandhya Shetty, Shane Nigam, Jean Paul Lal, Hannah Reji Koshy, Shine Tom Chacko, Vijilesh Karayad, Gayathrie Shankar, Cameo: Vineeth Sreenivasan        

Director: Priyadarshan

Language: Malayalam  

The randomly chosen title is the first indicator of Corona Papers’ vacuity. This new Malayalam thriller from veteran director Priyadarshan is a remake of writer-director Sri Ganesh’s Tamil cop drama 8 Thottakkal (8 Bullets). Ganesh is duly credited for the story, which in turn was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949) as he himself has told the media_._

Flawed though 8 Thottakkal was, it comes off looking better when compared with Corona Papers. Stray Dog was set in a post-war Japan mired in the socio-economic after-effects of defeat. In his search for an equally compelling context, Priyadarshan has zeroed in on the COVID-19 pandemic but fails to justify the titular reference with anything beyond a bank robbery conducted by men in PPEs and an incident in which a mask becomes a useful camouflage for a criminal. Honestly, if a policewoman had not hissed out the word “Corona” in exasperation after a fugitive escapes under this cover at one point, it would have been challenging to figure out the relevance of the film’s name. The lingering repercussions of the pandemic on India’s economy and polity, our personal finances and an already fractured psyche are all forgotten in this film in which, but for an occasional mask sighting, the Coronavirus is MIA.

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This is ironic because the Malayalam film industry led the way in adapting to the pandemic at its height in 2020-21, incorporating COVID-19 into themes, storylines and storytelling choices, starting with C U Soon in 2020 that was the first Indian film to be conceived, written and shot after COVID began ravaging our lives, and released just months after the first lockdown was declared. Equally disappointingly, as the new Malayalam New Wave goes hyper local, acquainting viewers with the finest nuances of cultural differences from city to city, district to district and community to community in Kerala, Corona Papers opts to be generic.

Shane Nigam plays Rahul in Corona Papers, ­an earnest, honest new recruit in the Kerala Police who loses his police revolver that turns up soon after in ­a bank heist in which someone is killed. The team assigned to that case is led by the unscrupulous Gracy (Sandhya Shetty) who ropes in Rahul when she learns of his mess-up. Alongside this track runs the story of a policeman (Siddique) who is under suspension for an extra-judicial killing in which Gracy framed him.

The connection between these two stories is known to the viewer from the start. The question of when Rahul and Gracy will discover the link is meant to drive the suspense in Corona Papers. It doesn’t work at all because too much information is revealed to us, the audience. The consequences of this over-sharing are heightened by a scattered and stretched out narrative, and storytelling that includes inconsistent attempts at film noir. After 2021’s Marakkar: Arabikadalinte Simham, here’s another sub-par addition to Priyadarshan’s filmography.

Corona Papers’ muted colour scheme is a constant on its otherwise uneven visual terrain. At places, the film switches inexplicably from naturalistic imagery to what feels like style for style’s sake. A close-up of a water droplet hitting the surface of a pool of water, a long shot of a solitary house surrounded by vast countryside, a flock of birds taking flight on this darkened landscape when a gun is fired, a man caught in silhouette under an umbrella in pouring rain, another watching him through his wet windshield from a car parked at a distance, well shot though they are, come across as pretentious, and can hardly be described as tributes to past works or attributes of a genre when they land in the midst of insipid writing and direction.

The gang that commits the bank robbery is the most engaging sub-set of Corona Papers’ plot. Their intelligent, experienced and educated leader is weighed down by the task of convincing a tempestuous associate that they cannot simply splurge the cash they stole. The elderly man’s caution is met with suspicion. Whether or not he can control his team, and how exactly they will ultimately unravel become the only interesting questions in the film.

Sincere but stuck with shallow characterisation, Shane Nigam ( Eeda, Kumbalangi Nights, Bhoothakaalam) gets to shine only in a scene in which he displays his physical prowess: an exciting chase on foot and in vehicles through crowded city roads. He can count his blessings though considering the treatment meted out to a bright youngster like Gayathrie Shankar by the script: her character, a video journalist, enters the picture to steer a crucial episode and is then pretty much forgotten till the end. And while on the subject of Gayathrie, could filmmakers please do some research on the professions they include in their films? Gayathrie’s character is only an intern yet is shown to be a regular anchor of a crime show on her channel.

The actors who dominate screen space in Corona Papers are Siddique and Sandhya Shetty. Siddique is saddled with LinkedIn-style njaanam on forgiving, forgetting, one being a human quality and the other divine (you get the picture?), that he dispenses to young Rahul who later quotes him as if it is ground-breaking wisdom worthy of being framed. Still, the senior actor’s gravitas, dignity and investment in his character are among the few bright spots in this superficial film. Sandhya, on the other hand, mistakes flatness for intensity and makes a bad film worse with her drab performance.

But wait, it goes further downhill. A plot twist at the end of Corona Papers is so silly that it threatens to erase even the good that Siddique has done in the film. Oh my Kurosawa!

Rating: 1.5 (out of 5 stars) 

This review was first published in April 2023 when Corona Papers was released in theatres. The film is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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