Kammattam Review | This 6-Episode, 115-Minute-Long Series About a Scam Feels Like a Bigger Scam

28, 22, 14, 16, 15, and 20. These are the durations in minutes of the episodes of the first ZEE5 original Malayalam series Kammattam, starring Sudev Nair. Well, the combined runtime of the series is 115 minutes, and even that has extensive usage of slow-motion shots. If they had written and edited it properly, it would have been at best an average 40-minute episode in a thriller. But by stretching a very basic thriller idea into a generic package of underwhelming twists and turns, Kammattam from Shan Thulasidharan feels like a scam about a scam.

One night, a man named Samuel Oommen was killed in a road accident. SHO Antonio George suspects the possibility of a murder when he arrives at the crime scene. What we see in the series is the investigation of the police by checking the available resources to find out what led to the death of Samuel.

The series is based on a real-life incident that happened in Thrissur. First of all, not all real-life incidents are worthy of being made into a cinema or series. And when the motive of a crime is something we have seen in movies and stuff, it obviously makes the content uninteresting. The craftsmanship on a writing level is required in such circumstances, and we have seen filmmakers approaching clichéd stories by looking at them from a different perspective. However, this series, or I should rather say a movie that got split into uneven pieces, has no such desire to narrate this Story from a fresh perspective. What we see here is a very linear narrative, and the twists are so outdated.

There were reports before the release of this series about how ZEE5’s debut Malayalam series was shot on a record time of just 11 days. Well, on a technical level, that feels like an impressive feat, but the truth of the matter is the audience doesn’t care whether it was done in 11 days or 11 months. Shan Thulasidharan, who previously made a feature film in 2023, Dear Vappi, just doesn’t have a new approach to tell this Story. One of the major problems with the movie’s writing is how it passes information to the audience through dialogue in the most obvious way. It’s not like the police are doing the investigation with their skill set. The hero and his subordinates are thinking out loud, and it is such a terrible level of underestimation of the intelligence of the viewers.

Sudev Nair, who is not that strong in speaking Malayalam, is trying to balance it out with his biceps. The weak writing was already depending on dialogues to convey things to the audience, and with Sudev’s flawed delivery of those worn-out dialogues, things weren’t becoming exciting. Arun Sol gets to play an important role in the series along with Ajay Vasudev, Akhil Kavalayoor, and Jordy Poonjar. Jins Bhaskar plays the role of a fellow investigating officer. People like Jeo Baby and Sai Kumar are there in the series for one or two scenes.

There is an ongoing discussion about how micro dramas and TV Plus content are probably going to be the revenue source for OTT platforms in the future. Micro dramas are content with less than two minutes duration, with several episodes in one go. TV Plus is content that will have a 20+ minute duration, and one season will have at least 20 episodes. The way Kammattam is structured, it does not fit into any of the formats. Considering the fact that the whole series is only 115 minutes long, including credits, if this series manages to bring in good viewership, this might eventually become the first TV Plus content, i.e, a modern-day upgrade of daily soaps, from Malayalam.