Hold Your Horses!!!
For the many who disagree with this article title, you need to understand one thing; there aren’t many Malayalam thriller films to begin with. Still, we stand by this statement – Amazon Prime Video’s ‘Cold Case’ is a credit to the Malayalam thriller genre. This Amazon Prime Video feature is actually classified as a multi-genre film – a supernatural investigative thriller to be precise. ‘Cold Case’ dropped last night on the OTT platform and social media platforms have been raking in the reviews for the film, which have ranged from mixed to decent and good reviews.
Of course, there have been multiple films of that genre which released in this year alone – a couple in the Malayalam language as well, but this movie is a decent thriller (maybe even a decent investigative thriller). However, this direct to OTT released film is not exactly a mix of both genres, rather the film shows an investigative side and a supernatural side, with “thrills” on both sides of the film.
Don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of things wrong in this film. The film script needs a lot of work, acting needs work and for the love of God, get better people to work (both speaking and editing) on the voice dubbing. However, ‘Cold Case’ has a few good things going its way. Surprisingly, the location scout deserves a huge mention. The film works well with some brilliant visuals and editing (a huge reason why this film still manages to be thrilling besides its many failures), but all of this only works because of the locations where the film was shot – hence the shout-out to the location scout. Especially, when they were forced to work under Covid-19 restrictions. As mentioned there was some terrible acting, but there were some brilliant, memorable side characters as well in the form of Zara Zacchai (A little controversial) and Chandrabhanu. However the male lead, Prithviraj managed to turn the lackluster dialogue into cinematic gold (slight exaggeration maybe, but the actor does good work). This is obviously not his best work, but the actor adds a bit of gravitas to the film, which it had badly needed.
Since the inception of Malayalam cinema till the mid-2010s, the amount of supernatural investigative thrillers released by the Southern film industry was negligible, compared to the number of Malayalam films released at the time. Now, in 2021 alone, we have ‘Chathur Mukham’, ‘The Priest’ and now, ‘Cold Case’. Each film brings something new and interesting to the Malayalam thriller genre, especially the Malayalam supernatural thriller kind. Hopefully, we will get to see more films like this in the future.