Organ donation is a theme with immense potential to unleash a flood of emotions between the recipient and the donor’s family. From heart transplants to restored eyesight, cinema tends to add extra emotional wattage to clinical procedures. Sathyan Anthikad’s Hridayapoorvam plays with this sentiment but forgets to give its amusing characters an engaging screenplay. The issue is not the lack of story but the sheer boredom it induces. The film feels like an H. H. Munro short story, only without the humour or the eccentricity.
Hridayapoorvam follows a heart patient, Sandeep Balakrishnan (Mohanlal), a middle-aged entrepreneur who runs a cloud kitchen. He gets lucky when a generous family donates the organ of Colonel Ravichandran, who is declared brain-dead after an accident. Revived and recovering, Sandeep finds companionship in Jerry (Sangeeth Prathap), a cheerful young nurse. Things shift when Haritha (Malavika Mohanan), the donor’s daughter, arrives to invite him to her engagement in Pune.
This is where the film’s logic begins to wobble. Haritha, a successful, wealthy architect, believes her father’s heart is inside Sandeep, somehow making him family. A thought that could work in a strong emotional drama feels like a bad TV soap here. Devika (Sangita Madhavan Nair), Haritha’s mother, is given equally poor material. Her strange behaviour hints at a failed marriage, but the writers (Sonu T P, Akhil Sathyan) only skim the surface and never explore it.
Instead, we get a naïve daughter sponsoring an all-expenses-paid vacation for a stranger and his plus one, simply because she was once daddy’s little girl. As one character quips, she either loved her father too much or she is simply cuckoo. Hridayapoorvam clearly confirms the latter.
The interval hints at a love triangle forming inside Sandeep’s head, but the film never focuses on the idea. Hridayapoorvam’s idea of bravery lies in paradoxes, such as criticizing the caste system in a household that flaunts caste pride (the nameplates confirm it), serving mutton on the lunch table, and being oddly proud of showing a Malayali woman in a pub and dating a black man.
The woke elements make us wonder if the filmmaker has truly come of age. After all, he once made films like Rasathanthram, where the leading man (Mohanlal, again) was deliberately given an upper-caste identity despite being a carpenter.
To make it worse, Anthikad piles on subplots that go nowhere. We see Siddique, Lalu Alex, Baburaj, and Sabitha in yawn-inducing cameos. Siddique, especially, is saddled with excess screen time in a highly redundant part. It’s painful to see the talented actor struggle hard to justify his remuneration. The humour rarely makes us laugh, and when it does, credit goes to the younger lot making the most of the scraps thrown at them.
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Music has always been an Anthikad strength, thanks to Johnson or Ilaiyaraaja, but not this time. Justin Prabhakaran’s background score relies on funny sounds for jokes that do not land, while the songs disappear without a trace. Editing by K. Rajagopal feels equally random. Remember the awkward teaser and the trailer? The film is cut in the same vein, with no rhythm and little impact.
What rescues Hridayapoorvam here and there are the actors, especially the newcomers. Saumya Bhagyan Pillai manages to elicit laughs despite appearing only on phone screens. Sangeeth Prathap injects real energy into the film, lifting every scene he enters. The park-bench exchange between him and Mohanlal towards the end is the only time we are reminded of Anthikad’s legacy in the feel-good genre. Janardhanan gets a somewhat interesting part, but there’s very little of him.
Mohanlal gets a part he could do in his sleep, and that is exactly how he plays it. It is not a bad performance, but there is nothing more he can do with it. Radiant in their own ways, Malavika and Sangita are impressive in their sketchy roles. Basil Joseph, however, is stuck in a listless cameo that easily ranks among the dullest in his otherwise terrific filmography. There’s a surprise star appearance right before the end credits, which only adds to the pile of unnecessary bits in the film, including a full-fledged fight scene.
In short, if there is anything more boring than Hridayapoorvam, it is the process of writing its review. Anthikad’s film feels like one of those long speeches at an A.M.M.A. press conference. It wants to sound profound but rarely shows courage. With no substance to begin with, its constant need to please everyone keeps genuine emotions light years away. For a film about a heart, it forgets the one thing it needed most: a beating one of its own.
Rating: ★★
