Two Deeply Disturbed Cops & One Helluva Film News24 –
Writer-Director Shahi Kabir’s one-night-in-the-life-of… narrative in the Malayalam Ronth initially seems like a routine cop-on-duty plot, with crackling police communication radios and assorted small-time criminals sauntering in and out of view, drunk or sober, preferably latter.
Then the film begins to assume another shape, a much darker and terrifying hue. By the time we reach the closure, it is hard to recognize Ronth as the laidback, slightly disturbing experience that we started with.
The jaded Yohannan (Dileesh Pothan) and his rookie partner Dinanath (Roshan Mathew) are no Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy from 48 Hrs. Both Yohannan and Dinanath have dark unresolved past encounters with suicides close to their family. They both fear themselves more than anything else.
As a writer, Shahi Kabir scores high in allowing the salient characters to grow in their mutual kinship, not so much through any external impetus but by an organic sense of unspoken hand-holding.
Of the two, Yohannan is hands-down the harder nut to crack. Before he can demonstrate his dark side, his colleagues and subordinates are heard sniggering behind their back. Before the night is through, we will get to see many unexpected sides to Yohannan’s character.
Right at the start, we see him preparing fish curry for his over-sensitive wife Saloni (well played by Laxmi Menon), pretending on the phone to his colleagues that his wife is doing the cooking.
Point to be noted: Yohannan is a caring husband. We get that. And I found the point being hammered in once too often. More significantly, Yohannan has a thing about child abuse. Of course, we all do. But this cop is shown rescuing and cradling at least three wailing children before the night is through.
In one instance, he showers blows on an abusive husband-father, shouting repeatedly, “Don’t touch the child.”
The abused wife evidently matters less to Yohannan. Such behavioural lapse and overlaps amplify the character’s believability. Dileesh Pothan embraces all of Yohannan’s contradictions. This is not a performance. It is a character ravelling-unravelling right before our eyes.
Right next to Dileesh Pothan is Roshan Mathew, one of the youngest and brightest star-actors from Kerala. We just saw him break the glass see-link in the series Kankhajura. Now, just weeks later in Ronth, he provides us a deep insight into a troubled mind trying to weave its way through a labyrinth of complex professional and personal conundrums.
Shahi Kabir puts the two cop-heroes through a series of night-patrol procedures. Not all of them make a big impact in isolation. But when they come together at the end, it feels as though we as an audience needed to be more involved, more alert.
Ronth doesn’t let us off the hook. It tells us that cinema is not only about entertainment. That the unresolved issues of the characters are not to be left behind in the darkness of the theatre. That unhealed characters wound us in ways we won’t even know until it’s too late.