First things first. Director Dominic Arun loves his superheroes. He invests his first attempt at the genre—and there will be others, for sure—with a kind of cheerful chutzpah that one associates with the cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee (the non-tragic sunshine films) or Rob Reiner.
Not that this work of popcorn art is comparable with Mukherjee or Reiner. But there is a quality of looming freshness and pounding hope in the screenplay.
Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra fuses fable with fun. It is unstoppable in its zest to seize the day and night, but stumbles and trips over its own trippiness while trying to get where it wants to in a hurry.
Many portions of the arching narrative feel cumulatively underwritten while being egregiously overburdened with a sense of nothingness, especially in the way the fringe characters come and go at will. There isn’t one memorable character on the bookshelf, someone we can peek into while the protagonist stops for a breather.
The entire focus is on Chandra. Kalyani Priyadarshan plays her as a waif in search of a miracle, but in too much of a hurry to wait. She looks lost and mysterious. A woman you wouldn’t like to run into in a dark alley. This, unfortunately, is exactly what happens to callow Sunny (Naslen) and his flatmates, who first ogle at Chandra from their window, and then get to know the truth about her.
That she sucks blood and is allergic to sunlight makes Chandra more a vampire than a superhero. This film couldn’t be bothered with labels.
The writers Dominic Arun and Santhay Balachandran push into mythology at this point, with self-limiting impact. The entire mythology of a super-child Neeli who has the power to vanquish the conquerors is done with the purpose of accentuating the protagonist’s character as a girl with a timeless past, who returns to places where awful things are being done to human beings by their own kind. The world needs Chandra. But does Chandra need the world?
The organ trafficking angle never takes off. Who are these miscreants in Benagaluru? Chandra is shown brutally snuffing out three or four goons. And that’s it.
The film lacks the panoramic vision that it aspires to adopt. The antagonist Nachiyappa Gowda (played by Sandy) is potentially an interesting illustration of male toxicity. He has an arresting moment at the start when he questions a woman who is being chased by goons rather than challenging the goons. But he remains a one-dimensional rascal, rather than something more disruptive.
The female cop who challenges Nachyappa’s dominance is even more of a caricature. A woman in a male-dominated domain trying to behave like one of the guys.
It isn’t as if Lokah lacks in a crackling mood of adventure. But its vision is limited by budget and actors who just can’t stop acting. It was especially disappointing to see Thomas Tovino as a clownish magician-conjuror with gold teeth and nothing much else to recommend himself.
By the time Dulquer Salman showed up at the end as a Ninja, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see any more of this.
Lokah is fun while it lasts. But it doesn’t play with the supernatural genre as agilely as Minnal Murali.
