While the other Indian film industries are still scratching their heads and trying to figure out their new courses of action for this year and the next, the filmy heads from Kerala have hit the ball out of the park with their latest thriller, C U Soon, which follows the format made popular by the 2018 American film, Searching. Again, all the credit cannot go to the entire industry as it’s the vision of just a bunch of people, starting with the inimitable Mahesh Narayanan.
What starts off as a breezy, twenty-first century romance story that unfolds on the screens of computers and mobile phones metamorphoses into a thriller of gargantuan proportions.
The action is chiefly contained within the claustrophobic circumstances and therefore it doesn’t involve montages or quick cutaways. But, in its place, it offers something else, something better.
Since the film uses computers to narrate its tale, it chooses to go through the rigmarole of dating apps. However, it’s not as tedious as it sounds and the director, too, doesn’t spend too much time on it.
When Jimmy (Roshan Mathew), 31, a bank employee, joins a dating app, he finds a match in Anumol Sebastian (Darshana Rajendran) within a few minutes. Although he asks for her number right after formally introducing himself, the latter doesn’t push him away immediately. It’s a bridge that both of them seem to be slowly building. They carry on their oddly painful, yet naïve, small talks on another platform by exchanging their pictures and keeping the momentum alive.
Jimmy comes across as somebody who’s too eager to please Anumol and holds on to every little point that she reveals and revels in its afterglow. Perhaps, it’s this quality of online dating that sets up the mood for the first fifteen minutes. Then, it literally takes a dark turn like how the pandemic arrived without a warning half a year ago. And this is where Malayalam cinema’s heart-throb, Fahadh Faasil (as Kevin Thomas), enters the movie. Kevin is on a video call with three other people and we learn about his job via the conversation they have.
The petals of the rose that C U Soon holds till then withers away as Kevin’s job description makes it amply clear regarding the purpose of his presence. He’s related to Jimmy and that’s how things go south from there. No, no, Kevin is not a regular villain; of course, anybody who has seen Fahadh Faasil’s eyes dance would believe it if he were presented as a baddie. But that’s not the case here. He’s the de rigueur rescuer, somewhat like the character he played in Mahesh Narayanan’s directorial debut, Take Off. Moreover, both these films thematically complement each other, as they depict the lives of Malayalis in the Middle East.
Oh, that’s another bold attempt there. The director brings Dubai to the screen without actually stepping foot into that city – the movie was written, directed, and edited this year. There’s no need to pan the cameras toward the visually rich and arid lands of the UAE for this film and that’s the magic trick that the team pulls off. All the characters live in various corners of the world and they interact through instant messaging services – Google Duo, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.
If Anumol and Jimmy had met in college, office, or in a place where it was possible for them to interact face-to-face, it’d have been totally different. They’d have probably hit it off with their initial hellos or they wouldn’t have thought of dating at all. I’m not talking about the format of the film; I’m rather explaining the gradual development of friendship between two people in a setup that doesn’t require artificial intelligence. But with dating apps, people usually try to dive into relationships without thinking much. The movie-maker has thought of this one-bit idea pretty well. And when you realize how easy it is for somebody to pull out your chats, pictures, videos, and even the crumbs of history that trace back to you with the click of a button, it’s bound to shock you.
While the Tamil film Vetri Kodi Kattu (2000), directed by Cheran, dug into the travails of the Tamil people who were fooled into paying hefty sums to get jobs in Dubai, C U Soon tracks a more morbid story from another pair of binoculars.
It’s amazing to watch Darshana Rajendran and Roshan Mathew slip into their roles with perfect ease and it becomes quite difficult to peel away from the Amazon Prime Video screen to take a moment to analyse the goings-on, as the movie keeps changing its lanes every fifteen minutes.
With the pandemic about, Malayalam filmmaker Mahesh Narayanan and actor producer Fahadh Faasil use the multiple screen format of story telling to bring us an effective dramatic thriller. C U Soon is a big win for Malayalam cinema and the imagination of humankind in terms of storytelling.
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