There is a tale to be told about the radicalization and trafficking of naive girls to inspire terror. However, after years of research, director Sudipto Sen presents The Kerala Story in a way that is more burlesque than an accurate portrayal of the issue. The film retains a contentious tone and uses an emotionally manipulative gaze, more akin to an add-on to The Kashmir Files. It appears that the filmmakers, like the bigots in the movie, are eager to turn viewers into hatemongers and give voice to their opinions in public.
It tells the story of three nursing students in Kerala who are brainwashed by an extremist group into believing that their gods are bad and that only Islam can be a source of guidance. The story is said to be based on true accounts of how innocent non-Muslim girls are recruited for the Islamic State. The girls are ensnared in a horrible game where they are used as props in an imaginary conflict between civilizations, lured in by love and twisted reasoning.
Story Of The Movie
One such young woman, Shalini, also known as Fatima Ba (Adah Sharma), is converted and sent to Syria with her spouse to fight for the Islamic State. She describes how she was lured to join the mission by another classmate, Asifa (Sonia Balani), and how she and her two classmates, Geetanjali (Siddhi Idnani) and Nimah (Yogita Bihani), while she was captured and imprisoned in Afghanistan. The two must endure the brunt of thwarting the evil scheme while Shalini perishes.
The treatment becomes more and more determined by local politics rather than cinematic sagacity, even though the premise calls for focus and emotional investment. While there are a few moving moments, the majority of the time, it’s either cunning beings with Muslim names or naive girls willing to buy the propaganda; there’s no room for nuance or a voice of reason. The treatment called for a delicate, subtle touch because there was so much suffering on paper, but Sen seemed determined to emphasize the point repeatedly.
Cast
For the first few minutes of her performance, Adah Sharma’s relatable style makes it easy to forget that she’s the same beauty queen whose occasional Instagram reels you see. It’s amazing how well she transformed into Shalini/Fatima. Adah Sharma was simply flawless in every way—from her body language to her accent to her flawless application of bruised and battered makeup. The character’s strongest point was how well she captured the subtleties of a young woman who has just started college and is incredibly innocent of the outside world, as well as how she gradually becomes influenced into becoming a terrorist. Sharma’s transformation on screen is nuanced but incredibly effective. Even in the interrogation scene, the character retains her innate innocence and sass; Sharma expertly captures these nuances and conveys them on screen. The only change is that the character was persuaded to do things she wasn’t aware were harmful.
You’ll certainly detest Sonia Balani to the core, even though you’ll adore Adah Sharma’s character—which is a fantastic accomplishment for an actor. She portrays the Muslim girl in the group who is attempting to indoctrinate her roommates. She portrays a character that anybody watching the movie will unavoidably start to detest with a straight face and no emotion at all.
Despite having less time on screen, Yogita Bihani and Siddhi Idnani both gave respectable performances. Despite having little depth and playing a supporting role in the story, their characters were crucial to the movie’s plot. The two actresses had little trouble and no trouble portraying the characters and their various nuances.
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Review Of The Kerala Story
Strangely, the authors choose not to present the story of who founded the Islamic State and why it does not have sympathy for Palestine during complicated geopolitical issues. Rather than go after the big fish, it is too busy severing women for carrying lipstick in places where there is a political vacuum. The opinions of numerous scholars and experts, who frequently wonder what kept Indian Muslims from joining the Islamic State, are not given enough room in it. Rather, The Kerala Story continues to propagate half-truths to project the numbers toward the end. Nonetheless, it is pleasing to witness Kerala’s scenic splendor in a Hindi movie, suitably juxtaposed against the harsh terrain of Afghanistan.
Prasantanu Mohapatra produced some excellent cinematography. The narrative came to life with the way he employed the drone footage taken from above combined with the unusual settings of the Middle East. You wouldn’t believe for a second that those sequences are from a Bollywood movie rather than something from the West because of the Hollywood feel he was able to bring to them.
The editing by Sanjay Sharma was passable. He was able to captivate the audience by telling the story in a back-and-forth fashion, leaving them wondering what would happen in each timeline. It was also a great job to condense such a large story into just two and a half hours.
The background score and music by Viresh Sreevalsa and Bishakh Jyoti are passable. The BGM certainly gives you the chills you need, but the use of a few songs during the romantic portions of the story didn’t seem quite right. And that too at a time when the songs themselves weren’t all that memorable.
“The Kerala Story” is an excellent resource for young girls and boys who are leaving home for college, as it provides guidance on what not to do when someone is brainwashing them. But the authors shouldn’t have painted the entire town as evil. Instead, they ought to have taken a far more impartial stand in their writing, providing the facts as they actually occurred as well as demonstrating that not all members of that community are evil. A broader perspective would have eliminated people’s impression that the movie was a propaganda piece and highlighted the ground reality much more vividly. Putting politics aside, Adah Sharma and Sudipto Sen’s direction of the film are excellent in and of themselves as a film. It’s an excellent one-time watch and quite exciting. I’ll give it three stars.
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