Award winning director Dr.Biju’s Veettilakkulla Vazhi (The way home) handles a simple but impressive idea and in the process of narrating it, takes you across several parts of India. Though this one is a slickly packaged movie that is unlike most of its genre, it also ends up a superficial attempt which never really gets deep enough into your heart.
Prithviraj plays a doctor, who has lost his wife and kid in a bomb blast in Delhi. While working in a prison hospital, a woman suicide bomber requests the doctor to find her son in a remote village in Kerala and hand him over to his father, a dreaded terrorist named Abdul Zuban Tariq. She dies soon after and quite curiously, Tariq is regarded as the mastermind behind the Delhi bomb blasts which killed the doctor’s family.
Now the doctor finds the kid and the film is about their journey to find the terrorist. They go to Pushkar, Jaisalmer and Ladakh. The journey is a tedious one and the doctor is viewed with suspicion not just by the police, but also by the members of the terrorist outfit. But his intention is noble, which is to find the boy’s father and hand over his son to him.
The doctor’s travels, his interactions with several people including a young terrorist named Razzak (Indrajith) are shown in detail. The story is progressing in a rather predictable format, without many surprises and that too, in a leisured way. And it leaves behind several doubts in the minds of the viewer. Like for instance, what if the suicide bomber died during the blasts? She didn’t care about her child until the moment when she found the doctor, just by chance?
Writer-director Dr.Biju has modeled his film mostly in the conventional offbeat format and though it is developing in several significant places in north India, there is no real effort to give an essence of the places to the viewers. Still, it is quite an achievement that the director has tried to think beyond the boundaries of the state, which is in fact the relevance of the film as well. M J Radhakrishnan’s visuals and Ramesh Narayan’s music are really good.
Prithviraj has to look serious and he comes up with a nice show. But his vibes with the young boy (Master Govardhan) lacks the fizz, which is quite surprising as it could perhaps have been more enjoyable if it was there. The rest of the cast that includes Indrajith, Dhanya Mary, Irshad, Lakshmipriya and Kiran Raj have done their brief roles pretty well.
Veettilekkulla Vazhi has its moments but you may need some real patience on your part to find them in between. There is an attempt to take you along to various cultures across India, but it is generally not really effective mainly due to its unconvincing storyline. But still, there is a certain amount of sincerity that has gone into its making which needs to be appreciated
