‘Kaathal – The Core’ movie review: Mammootty steers a daring attempt that pays off

Mammootty and Jyothika star in Joe Baby's film about a loveless marriage, revealing the reason at its core - the sexual orientation of one partner. A no-frills narrative, Kaathal tackles a taboo subject in a conventional family drama setting. A powerful film, it celebrates the possibilities of opening people’s minds to different sexual orientations

Kaathal (Core) is perhaps quite the apt title for a film that peels apart the shell of a loveless marriage, revealing the reason at its core — the sexual orientation of one of the partners. 

In another sense, too, it is apt in how the film’s subject, and its treatment, would shake to the core a considerable section of the society who are yet to open up their minds to the possibility of people having different sexual orientations.

Yet, Jeo Baby’s film is not pointing a finger or directing a haranguing speech at them. Rather, it tells them that they are products of their time, as one of the key characters in the film is, and that it is never too late to open up the mind just a little bit more and let more colours enter their lives. 

‘Tells them’ might be a wrong way to put it, for the film hardly ever tells anything, except in some clunky courtroom exchanges. It chooses to put us amid these characters as they all come to terms with a set of revelations that is about to change the course of their entire lives. 

Mathew Devassy (Mammootty), a much respected man in a village with a close-knit community, is set to contest in the local body elections as an independent candidate of the Left party. Around the same time, Omana (Jyotika), who has been married to him for the last twenty years, files for divorce, citing the denial of her physical needs due to his homosexual orientation. 

Quite some irony is at play in Kaathal for factors that are exterior to the film. Here is a star, a good part of whose mass popularity is attributed to portraying characters projecting hyper-masculinity, playing a homosexual character in a film industry where such characters still hardly get any representation, except as caricatures or criminals. The import of the film lies also in this broader context, for the sheer power it lends to efforts towards sensitising the larger society.

But, at the same time, to reduce it to a mere vehicle of social messaging would be to close our eyes to the emotionally moving drama which lies at its core. Screenwriters Adarsh Sukumaran and Paulson Skaria serve a no-frills narrative, which never deviates from the conflict at its centre, with every other character interaction in the film revolving around it.