SonyLIV dropped an emotional Malayalam thriller on 17th September, ‘Kaanekkaane’. The film has been getting good reviews so far and has been lighting up on social media over the last few days. The movie was under-marketed, but the film managed to make a huge splash thanks to its story, acting and direction. That is why it can get quite irritating when the subtitles are released incorrectly for the movie. Especially since the inconsistencies mess with the flow of the film.
“He doesn’t know how lucky he is.” is a line which keeps repeating throughout Kaanekkaane(within the English subtitles). During important scenes, songs or whenever the actors are not even talking about anything; this line comes out of nowhere and damages the flow of the film. What is worse, you would have missed a critical plot point if you do not know the language and would not even have noticed it. And Kaanekkaane isn’t the only OTT platform with subtitle errors either.
All OTTs which are currently operating within India have had some subtitle issue or the other – especially with the non-English releases (even English releases have problems as well). Netflix’s QC team (Quality Control team) managed to make a mess of the previously existing subtitles of the Malayalam hit film, ‘Nayattu’ – and released a sub-par version of their own. Disney+ Hotstar’s recently released ‘Bhoot Police’ did a “rush job” – and provided us with even worse subtitles than Netflix did for Nayattu. ZEE5 didn’t even have English subtitles for one of the best Malayalam movies of the year – ‘Operation Java’ for a long time. Amazon Prime Video made a huge mistake with the digital release of a Hollywood film, ‘The Mauritanian’ – the OTT didn’t provide subtitles for the non-English speaking parts of the film.
As you can see, this subtitle problem has become a running joke among streaming platforms. Still, Kaanekkaane has a smaller issue compared to the above mentioned OTT subtitle problems – so we hope that the QC team of SonyLIV will rectify this problem soon. Kaanekkaaneis a good movie, and pretty much every line makes a difference in this emotional rollercoaster.