Sumathi Valavu Review | A Generic Horror Movie Idea Made Passable by the Humor

Sumathi Valavu is the second collaboration between director Vishnu Sasi Shankar and writer Abhilash Pillai, following Malikappuram. The movie, starring Arjun Ashokan in the lead role, intends to be a horror comedy, and thankfully, some of the moments they managed to create were genuinely funny. With the overall structure having a familiarity and the packaging having that outdated structure, Sumathi Valavu is a passable horror film with nothing unique to its credit.

The movie is set in the early ’90s, and it is set against the backdrop of a village in Kerala that shares borders with Tamil Nadu and is surrounded by forest. There is a spooky part of the road that connects the village to the outside world, and the villagers call it Sumathi Valavu. They believe the ghost of a woman named Sumathi is there, and she won’t let anyone cross that place at night. What we see in the movie Sumathi Valavu are the issues that happened in the life of our main character Appu due to this turn and the ghost.

If you look at the movies written by Abhilash Pillai, the way he creates moments and places dialogues without much subtlety have made almost all those films slightly dated in terms of treatment. He even follows a formulaic trajectory in unfolding the drama in those stories. In Sumathi Valavu, you can see the screenplay again trying to be that package idea. There is that compulsion to have an intro song kind of thing. Then you have two romantic songs. There is this mockery the hero faces from his friends. And there is even a fight sequence that was unnecessarily heroic. However, what is refreshing this time is the fact that there is a layer of comedy that goes well with the template horror they have used. And there are moments where the outrageous deeds done by the gang would make us laugh out loud.

Arjun Ashokan, as the main lead of the movie, is a good choice as he has a history of playing these partially heroic and slightly scared boy-next-door characters. Balu Varghese plays the role of his close friend in the typical style. Anand Sreebala fame Malavika Manoj plays the female lead in the movie. There was a kind of humor required to pull off that character, and she was able to bring that to the performance. Gokul Suresh, as the beta version of Suresh Gopi, has achieved that refinement in performance. Shravan Mukesh, the son of actor Mukesh, who has tried to make a switch by playing a villain role, has the physicality to be one, but the dialogue delivery gave a mild threat to Madhav Suresh. Vishnu Sasi Shankar repeats the Malikappuram duo Deva Nandha and Sreepath in this movie as well, and the child actors were able to deliver the big lines without making it cringe. Pani fame Bobby Krurian plays the role of that clichéd arrogant police officer. Abhilash Pillai who has done these one or two scenes minor roles in his previous films, plays a slightly more prominent role in this one. Saiju Kurup, Siddharth Bharathan, Sshivada, Sija Rose, KU Manoj, etc., are the other major names in the cast, and some of the cast memebers we saw during the this movie’s promotions, have no significant purpose in the Story.

The familiar packaging from Abhilash Pillai gets a familiar treatment from Vishnu Sasi Shankar. Like I already said, the movie is tapping into that slightly Romanjam-ish zone of horror comedy, and the sequences in those areas were captured neatly. There are these generic bits in the film that aren’t really creating much impact, and you can sort of understand that the screenplay is following a pattern. Because of that familiarity, the sequences like the interval block feel less impactful in terms of mystery, but keep us engaged due to other creative elements, like how they play with the sound mixing to create an illusion of a ghost. The music by Ranjin Raj is in his usual zone.

Sumathi Valavu has its moments of humor here and there, and the rest of it is your usual ingredients. If you look at the core conflict in this movie, it is a family drama Story, which we have seen in the ’90s and ‘2000s, featuring someone like Jayaram. Set in the ’90s, Abhilash Pillai is trying to tell a similar Story. However, he gives it a smart tweak by placing the horror angle to create a different kind of challenge for the hero.