Light In The Room - Film Review

What’s the age to learn the morality besides all the wrong influences life gives you? What happens when you act ungrateful to someone and just after moments you seek existence defining help from that person? You shout and scream, right? And that’s when you realize what the weeping and screaming in pain mean — the mental pain. The film ‘Ottamuri Velicham’ or ‘Light in the Room’ revolves around marital rape and domestical violence on women. What makes this film different is the constant fear we feel along with the character. Forget the character depth, it’s beyond that.

The film begins with the marriage day of Sudha (Gorgeous Vinitha Koshy) and Chandaran (Deepak Parambol). Sudha is naive. Chandaran is, as his mother describes, hotheaded. His mother calls him otherwise loving person but doesn’t seem at all. Sudha is a girl without parents who come to a village settled between green mountains with a valley and a river after marriage. The people there are poor. Chandaran is a genius electrician of wrong spelled shop name but rapes on his wife after getting drunk. The evil man thinks it is normal, as his father used to do, to hit his woman with a hammer and then have sex with her in a room where the curtain is the door. Within 2-3 meters distance, his mother and brother sleep but doesn’t get up to help as one doesn’t care and the other doesn’t gather courage. His mother is there for the cure and applies for medicines on her injuries but rarely speak up against him. She tries to run away but couldn’t succeed. She finds some tricks to get away with the cruelty and how fate justice her is what lies ahead in this gripping and emotionally engaging story.

The director Rahul Riji Nair sets up the mood of this Malayalam film when the central characters are getting into the jeep on their wedding day and he doesn’t let her sits where she was sitting. We could see the excellence in writing and direction often like the symbolism used for wildness when Sudha is trembling between a wild pig and Chandaran. The detailing of electrical stuff, beds, chairs, etc. is spot on. The constant terror we feel being Sudha is the victory of both the actors. The songs, beautiful locales and the camera capturing them are apt.

There is a light in the room which disturbs Sudha while sleeping in initial days but she didn’t know that something else would not let her sleep further. We see the color changes to red from the light he calls the invention of life when he grabs her little face. Her sarees’ colors are also changing from blue-green to red as the film progresses. She stops replying to the Bulbul. There are superb symbols and metaphors like the pig in the pit, doll behind the curtain, etc. We feel, relate and emote every punch, slap and kick she goes through and also when the light get switched off.

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O978ERb6-OM