Review of movie Natakam

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Rating:2/5

Natakam is a film that is hard to like, seeing as how it takes forever to establish the reason why the story has any of the elements it does. Koti, the protagonist of this tale, grows up without a mother with just his equally drunk father for company. When in a cringe-worthy scene, it’s revealed that he has a step-mother and a half-sister; it takes him a while to warm up to them. He even behaves brutishly with both women at first and sees no point in his sister even finishing her degree. But of course, he soon sees the error of his ways and begins loving his stepmom like his own. 

It however takes him absolutely no time to fall in love with a random stranger he happens to see walking by, named Parvati. Why Parvati too reciprocates his love immediately and seems more than willing to be a part of his life is a mystery that’s solved at the end. But does Natakam make you care enough about Koti and Parvati to be surprised or distraught when the ‘twist’ of the tale comes through? It does not. What it does do instead is string together seemingly random sequences to form a film riddled with plot holes. 

Koti seems to suffer from a massive god complex and be the saviour of everyone in the village despite his brutish nature, and it’s a point that’s driven home time and again throughout the film. When a few girls from the village don’t return home from college, it doesn’t occur to anyone to call the police or form a search party. They just wait around for them to return home. But of course, Koti is around to save the day, if only for his darling Parvati. The fact that his sister too travels to college and might not have returned home is something he doesn’t seem to give a damn about.