Eko, a smartly written film, loses steam midway but somehow stays afloat and deliver the goods, notes Arjun Menon.
Following the blockbuster success of Kishkindha Kaandam, Director Dinjith Ayyathan and Screenwriter Bahul Ramesh have joined hands again for Eko.
This time, they navigate the textures of the search for a missing person's narrative into a layered meditation on mood and restraint.
Conflicting accounts, abrupt motivations and a morally compromised group of characters drive the drama in Eko, whereas Kishkindha Kaandam used the inherent grief of a man with memory issues as a point to examine the thin lines between reality and the lies we tell ourselves.
The forest is a stand-in for the labyrinthine construction of the world of Eko.
This is a film that works for how it efficiently pulls the rug from under your feet and reveals only the right exposition at the right time.
Bahul Ramesh's intriguing formula of step by step proliferation of facts and key information keeps the characters messy and non reductive enough to impose the mystery upon them.
Though Eko is contained mostly within a forest and two houses, it manages to give of the expanse and scope of a period film that traces its conflicts from the time of the second World War and integrates the immigration of Malayalis from South East Asia. The peripheral details and background information lends itself to rich, textured device for suspense generation.
The film could have easily been the called The Strange Adventures of Kuriachan,, the enigmatic character played by Saurabh Sachdeva, whose search slowly unravels a gruelling world of theories and heightened revelations that would be difficult to sit through in another movie.
Naxalites, dog breeders and dogs become the main players in the search for Kuriachan and his murky past.
No one seems to know what to believe about this missing man and the film uses the 'loyalty' of dogs (read animals) to its owners and how that dynamic becomes a major marker for its thematic exploration of the conflicting relationship between man and animal.
The film was sold to us as the third part of the 'animal trilogy', a thematic trilogy following Kishkindha Kaandam (2024) and the second season of Kerala Crime Files (2025).
Eko tries to expand on the earlier themes and how they use the complicated relationships between masters and the ones who serve as an entry point into moral debates about freedom and domestication.
Eko is not as easily accessible as Kishkindha Kaandam, a more fun and riveting narrative of a crime with a man with memory loss at its centre.
The crime in Eko is more of an ambient detail and an excuse for Bahul and Diljith to expound on the nuances of a fractured world, one which is often ignored in our mainstream films.
But the screenplay of Eko is so caught up in the machinations of its own world building that important character dynamics and filler scenes are lost. For instance, every human interaction is played out like an exposition expounding device and the personality of the actors playing the parts and the subversion of their on screen images gives us the jolt, which the writing is not interested in exploring.
Eko has got too many things going on and each scene is trying to contextualise the larger narrative, yet within diminishing returns as the careful facade of artifice and mystery is too overzealous in its attempts at novelty.
The film is sometimes too smitten by its own greatness and relies on endless hyperbole and 'build up' by characters as a means to mount the tension.
But that is a passing flaw in a film that does so much with its internal logic and space.
This is a film bolstered by first rate performances from its ensemble characters, who, forgive the cliche, become disparate strands of the central puzzle.
Sandeep Unikrishnan gels well with the material and makes the case for a successful career ahead as a leading man.
Even though the screenwriting swings negates any possibility for a hero figure, Sandeep carries the weight of the momentous reveals with aplomb as the caretaker/helper boy.
Vineeth is also refreshingly cast in a role that goes against his preconceived onscreen credentials.
The performances suffer to a degree owing to the over designed aspect of the exposition and backstories, that make characters mere mouthpieces for large chunks of information to be revealed later on as the narrative unfolds.
Narain and Ashokan manage to pull us into the layers of intrigue and their frustration at being hoodwinked by lies and wrong paths also becomes the audience reaction to these events.
Milathi, the wife to the missing Kuriachan, is also the kind of emotional grounding the film needs.
A Malaysian woman 'domesticated' by Kuriachan, this character is the kind of creative call that sets apart a film like Eko. Her casting and conception is so novel that it achieves an emotional layer the film almost desperately needed.
Eko runs the gamut of being a mere mechanical suspense delivery device without these inspired writing touches. The thin lines between man and beast are evoked with care and becomes a recurring idea in the film.
Bahul Ramesh, who also handles the cinematography, adds to the meditative textures with the damp colour palettes and you almost feel the truth eventually emerge from the abrasive rush of the mist that surrounds the characters.
Dinjith Ayyathan is in tune with the overwrought verbose nature of the screenplay and uses camera placements and grounds the tone with his relaxed film-making style.
He never rushes to a revelation, takes his time and slowly crescendos to the reveal with a sense of visual finesse and tonal consistency.
Mujeeb Majeed's score adds to the intrigue.
Eko is not the nail-biting, emotional roller coaster that submerges you in a singular emotional arc.
It's a more ambitious film-making that prioritises twists as its major mode of storytelling.
It's a wonder to see meditative, almost self-contained pieces of commercial cinema in today's blink and miss, attention-starved streaming era.
It's like a film well tuned to its assured rhythms and unafraid to stall the suspense through the runtime.
There is no visible compromise in the technical crafts and the vision is uniformly packed for mass consumption, without running the risk of esoteric verbal excess.
The smartly written film loses steam midway, but manages to remain afloat and deliver the goods.
Eko Review Rediff Rating:
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