Kothanodi: Review

Kothanodi. Here is a movie all about the world its characters inherit. That is not to say the characters are not given importance. What I mean is that when the movie ends, the character that has lodged itself the deepest in your mind is the fantastic world of Kothanodi. What makes this all the more impressive is that this particular character stays in the background all throughout as the humans (and a vegetable) parade around making extremely strong cases to be remembered. Maybe it is because nearly every scene, every frame, serves the atmosphere that this movie works so hard to create. And this atmosphere is helped immensely by an amazing score that, though a little loud at times, never misses a beat, keeping your spine tingling to various degrees all throughout. The stories themselves are known to most Assamese people already and the movie stays faithful to them almost to a fault. This is not necessarily a complaint but I felt that while the storytelling was on point - character motivations taking the necessary time to form out of the mist of information expertly thrown at us in small chunks - a little more effort could have gone into making the story bigger than the sum of its parts. If I have a complaint, it is that one of the stories, that deals with (and I'm not spoiling anything here, trust me) infanticide doesn't make a particularly convincing case for being included here among the other three. Thematically, it felt a little disconnected from the rest of the narrative. But ultimately, the atmosphere and the world building do manage to tie it to the rest of the story and so it is not something that took me out of the movie. Another thing I noticed is that the low budget does rear its ugly head (or heads, three to be exact) in a scene or two but I believe it was inevitable, given the scope of what was being attempted here and the film makers, instead, deserve credit for the numerous scenes where it wasn't very obvious at all when it easily could have been. All things considered, this is an important movie because of where its focus lies. World building. We don't get that from Indian Cinema very often. Had this movie failed in its attempt at the same for innumerable reasons, it would still have deserved praise for the effort. As it is though, I guess we were in luck.

Watch the movie now at moviesaints.com