‘Uyir’ Movie Review: A regular police procedural with an outdated approach

A scene from the movie Uyir.

In recent years, hardly a month has passed without the Malayalam film industry producing a police procedural. M. Padmakumar’s Uyir, this month’s offering, is based on a true story and is also co-written by Shaji Maarad, a police officer, along with Nikhil M. Menon. Maybe there’s something about the variety of unusual situations that the police force deals with on a daily basis that will get more cops writing scripts.

Movie: Uyir (Malayalam)

Starring: Roshan Mathew, Baiju Santhosh, Shruthy Menon, Vineeth Thattil, Athulya Chandra

Directed by M. Padmakumar

Plot: A rookie police officer investigates the mysterious death of an unknown woman whose body is found in an abandoned well.

Duration: 138 minutes

The creators of Uyir have the advantage of working with a remarkable true story, with the ability to play with the excess of human emotions. Unfortunately, it didn’t translate well on screen. After the body of an unidentified woman surfaces in an abandoned well, Ajeeb Rahman (Roshan Mathew), who is on probation as a sub-inspector, continues to follow leads across multiple states. What at first appeared to be a case of suicide soon turns out to be something much more serious with different elements.

M. Padmakumar, who has a commendable body of work including Vasthavam and Joseph, takes a leisurely approach to the crime, starting with the officer’s personal trauma, which has now become the basis of most police procedurals. But in Uyir, the traumatic part returns to the narrative towards the end, when a tenuous connection between the cause of the trauma and the case Ajeeb is investigating is hinted at.

The film’s handling is such that at no point in the story do any of the revelations hit you hard, although some are shocking enough. Scripture must take some of the blame for this. The same problem was visible in Paathirathri (2025), another police procedural written by Shaji Maarad. One of the strangest possibilities is the presentation of different versions of the story by an unreliable narrator. When the story remains almost the same in the second narration with only a change of characters, a quick montage would have conveyed the point, but the makers decided to go for laborious repetition of the entire sequence at the same pace.

The script is so structured that neither the shock of the crime nor the emotions of the human story are adequately expressed. Mars Uyir’s antiquated approach is evident even in the use of songs at the most inopportune moments in a film that really doesn’t need any. An uninspiring background score further adds to this dated feel. Roshan Mathew manages to convey the eagerness and vulnerability of a rookie cop, but there’s only so much each of the actors can do in a film that doesn’t give them enough material to work with.

With its unimaginative and outdated approach, Uyir doesn’t break through and ends up being a run-of-the-mill police procedural.

Published – 26 Jun 2026 19:54 IST