Meesha Review | A Wannabe Political Film That Ends up Being Gimmicky and Shallow

Meesha from Emcy Joseph, the director of the movie Vikruthi, marks a strong departure from the kind of film the director made previously. Made as a movie strictly from the masculine gaze, Meesha wants to appear as an intricate tale of male bonding and ego. However, as we get to see the core of the Story, it becomes simpler and unnecessarily complicated. With the dialogues that were supposed to stimulate a sense of rage falling flat, Meesha almost becomes this pretentious effort that can’t hide its mediocrity.

Ananthu gets a call from his best friend Mithun, who works in the forest department, after a really long time, and Mithun has invited him to stay inside the forest. However, the last meeting between these two wasn’t a smooth one, and hence Ananthu was hesitant to accept the invitation. What we see in Meesha are the events that unfold at that get-together when two men with secrets meet.

The basic idea here is to explore the impulsive and cunning side of the masculine energy. And to make it look suspicious, Emcy Joseph has chosen the backdrop of a forest where things have a wild side. While the selection of backdrop becomes a metaphor of the kind of hunt that is happening on the political layer of the film, the writing of the movie is flawed. And when I say writing, I mean the director’s inability to package the ideologies into refined dialogues. The kind of things the party leader tells our main guys and the way the whole situation changes when differences in opinion arise are all very superficial, and the movie is skimming through everything. And the obvious politics of caste and the divide and rule policy are all conveyed in the most explicit manner, and that sort of feeding feels a bit lazy.

Emcy Joseph has certain plans to make this movie visually different, and many of the ideas he has to achieve that feel very gimmicky. In the initial part of the movie, there is an evident focus on the mustaches of the main male characters. In one of those back-and-forth narrative moments, we have this green screen transition featuring the character played by Hakkim Shah. And in the second half of the movie, there is this gun sequence featuring Shine Tom Chacko where the focus goes to the barrels of the gun. They may have planned something amazing in their head. However, the end result we see feels like a gimmick, almost to confuse people that something profound is happening.

Towards the end of the movie, we are shown that some sort of revolution has happened. But because of the lackluster lines written to communicate those politics, we won’t really feel the emotional shift happening. There are two tracks happening in the movie in parallel, and the second one featuring the characters played by Shine Tom Chacko and Srikanth Murali is unable to convey anything memorable other than the ironic scenario, which we see while the credits roll. The visual effects in general were on the weaker side. While the elephant really looked believable, the movement of all the other animals looked flawed, and in many sequences, the green screen was evident, and also the conversion of day to night makes certain scenes look really bad on screen.

If you are someone who is totally unaware of the existence of an actor like Kathir, then the fact that Sanju Shivram has dubbed for him might not bother you much. However, since I know what his actual voice is, watching him with a different voice that has no similarity with his original sound was a bit difficult. In terms of performance, I think the movie is offering him a chance to be this playful and mysterious character. While most of that characterization was a distraction, it was good to see him in a different zone. Hakkim Shah plays the role of Anandhu, and we are actually seeing the Story from his perspective for most of the part. The performance was fine, but there were these jarring transitions for that character in certain moments. Sudhy Kopa gets a very interesting character in the movie. The kind of Shakespearian feel in the Story, which Emcy Joseph sort of claimed during the promotions of the film, is only there in that character. But towards the very end, because of the flawed writing, that character’s transition also looked very odd on screen. I think the movie was shot long ago, and the Shine Tom Chacko we see here is the old eccentric one. And the eccentric mannerisms actually work in favor of that character. The only performance that I felt was in the correct meter came from Srikanth Murali. Jeo Baby plays a character with a negative shade. While some of the lines his character says in the movie are catchy and thought-provoking, the way it was written and performed felt a little too theatrical.

Meesha’s aspiration is to be a political Story that shows how the people in power manipulate and use the affected people for their political benefit. Something we have seen in a movie like Kammatti Paadam. And for such movies to have an impact, finding a connection with characters is essential, and us feeling their journey is also important. Meesha from Emcy Joseph tries to be too many things in one go, and it ends up becoming a nothing movie about political exploitation.