It takes a while for us to get a hang of this enigmatic excursion into the land of impenetrable mysterious processes. This is almost like Francis Ford Coppola’s jungles in Apocalypse Now, where the mysteries unfold piece by piece.
Director Dinjith Ayyathan’s film is a hard nut to crack. To get to its core we the audience need to denude ourselves of all earlier notions of what cinema is supposed to do. And be.
Rather than inform and illuminate, Eko mystifies and alienates us from the characters who at best remain, shadowy puzzles, more cryptic than contoured.After a point I stopped trying to figure out who all the characters were supposed to be.
Not all of this holds together. At the “climax” of the storytelling (why does a film with such an unorthodox cadence need a pulse-pounding climax?) when two undercover cops Soman and Sukumaran (the latter played by the redoubtable Binu Pappu) chase the villain through the ominous forest.
We get the feeling that the plot is in pursuit of thrills rather than remain true to the original theme of protection and confinement.
The core of the plot is about a Malaysian woman Malaathi (Biana Momin) who lives the life of an exiled hermit in the forests of Kerala (imagine Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, rendered frail and vulnerable by karma , or so she seems) who is looked after by a charming devoted boy Peeyoos.This character is the film’s backbone.
Sandeep Pradeep who plays Peyoos is normally seen in light-veined roles. Here he is given sinister shades which he carries off with effortless effrontery . It is an impressive performance, trapped in a character whose shifting morality doesn’t quite land the way we expect it to.
There is too much happening in Eko, none of which really reveals much about the characters beyond their greed and duplicity. Almost every one in the plot is subaltern waiting to escape into a life that may not be tenable,at least not in the position where the characters are placed.
The crux of the cryptic plot is the search for a missing person Kuriachan (Saurabh Sachdeva) who , once upon a time,tricked the young Maalathi (Sim Zhi) into marrying him. This clandestine cohabitation comes at a heavy price.
I am not too sure whether writer Bahul Ramesh and director Dinjith Ayyathan really get their act together, at least not completely. There are many fabric-ends that stick out of the chaotic though coherent pastiche.
There is a massive canine presence in the narration. Dogs breeding, training, commanding , threatening and restricting , play a huge hand in the final amorphous shape of the presentation.
Eko is like an echo into an unexplored chamber. The sounds that rush back to us are filled with pain and unplumbed faith in the healing powers of Nature. Strangely for all its compassion the film offers no silver linings for the protagonist. Till the end Malaathi remains a woman searching for a home. In that sense she is all of us, and none of us.
