Pennu Case movie review: An average con drama sans any exciting elements

The least of the expectations that one would have from a movie having a con woman as its protagonist is a few intelligently pulled off con jobs. In Febin Sidharth’s debut directorial Pennu Case, Rohini (Nikhila Vimal) is right away introduced to us as someone indulging in marriage fraud, with her ‘victims’ spread across Kerala and Karnataka. But it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to actually portraying how she fooled each of the men into getting married to her or how she made her escape, leaving them in the lurch. At one point, the police team lead by CI Manoj (Hakim Shahjahan) is shown mapping her targets to the rural belts of Kerala, but after this, precious little is shown as to what exactly she does on the ground. She just disappears after each of the weddings, we are told. Rohini managing to not have photographers for the weddings, citing her camera shyness, is probably the only interesting bit of writing in these sequences. Only in the case of one victim do we get to see how she goes about convincing a hapless man that she is the one for him. But not much imagination has not been put to use in staging these scenes too.  

This approach is perhaps true of almost the entire film, in which the screenwriter and the director appear to be taking half measures all through. In such an approach, every other scene hits below the expected mark, leaving hardly any impact. This is evident especially in the supposedly humourous scenes, which hardly evoke even a chuckle. Unlike how it was promoted, the film’s tone is more on the serious side for much of its run-time. Just like the recent series Nagendran’s Honeymoons, also with a protagonist who commits marriage fraud, Pennu Case fails to use any of the possibilities of the material at hand. 

As the film reveals its big twist towards, all the holding back of details till then, appears to be very deliberate. Of course there were intelligent and interesting ways of going about this, but the screenwriter chooses the easy way out. Nikhila Vimal gets a character which holds a lot of potential, but it appears quite under-written. She also approaches the character in a laidback manner, which might have worked for a different kind of character, not for a con woman. All of it appears to be part of the deception that the film indulges in, to make the final twist effective. Though it helps land Pennu Case in average territory, this part is also not particularly inventive, but derived from the famous final moments of a 1990s movie. If only they managed to add a little dose of excitement.