ANOMIE: THE EQUATION OF DEATH MOVIE REVIEW
Cast: Bhavana, Rahman, Shebin Benson, Arjun Lal, Vishnu Agasthya, Drishya Raghunath
Director: Riyas Marath
Rating: 3.5/5
Anomie opens like it has something to prove, and for a good stretch, it does. Debutant Riyas Marath builds a serial killer procedural with genuine visual ambition, the kind of film where every frame feels storyboarded down to the last shadow. That it eventually trips over its own aspirations doesn’t erase how much it gets right before then.
Zaara Philip (Bhavana) is a forensic expert whose younger brother Ziyan (Shebin Benson), still reeling from their parents’ death, vanishes. Her investigation reveals a disturbing pattern: young adults with troubled mental health (similar to Ziyan) have been disappearing and turning up dead. Running parallel is Ghibran (Rahman), a cop carrying the baggage of a botched case, whose sloppy handling puts him directly at odds with Zaara. Two people chasing the same truth from opposite ends, one armed with science and grief, the other with authority and guilt.
The first half is Bhavana’s, and she owns it. Her Zaara is precise, driven, and quietly furious. She rattles off forensic jargon with the fluency of someone who’s lived inside a lab, and you buy it completely. Sujith Sarang’s cinematography reinforces the divide between the two tracks: cold blues and sterile greys for Zaara’s world, warmer and moodier tones for Ghibran’s. That colour separation is one of the film’s smartest choices.
The procedural elements hum along. Clues get revisited, a recurring sound bite becomes a connective thread across crime scenes, and the detailing doesn’t dumb itself down. Marath trusts the audience to keep up, and it pays off. Harshavardhan Rameshwar’s background score, his first in Malayalam, adds tension to scenes the writing alone might not have carried.
Once the second half shifts focus to Ghibran’s redemption arc, the film trades Zaara’s cerebral pursuit for a more conventional cop-chases-villain template. Rahman’s character is written as a man haunted by professional failure, but his brooding reads more flat than tormented. The action sequences that fill this stretch feel like padding, and you start to miss Zaara’s methodical presence.
Then there’s the climax, which swings for the fences with a high-concept reveal involving consciousness, the nature of death, and philosophical sci-fi territory. The “equation of death” dream sequence is genuinely striking to look at. But the film hasn’t laid enough groundwork for this pivot to feel earned. It’s as if the movie spent two hours building a procedural house and then tried to launch it into space in the final twenty minutes. The villain’s philosophy, the most original element in the script, arrives too late and gets too little room. You can’t even call it pseudo-science.
Bhavana’s comeback anchors the whole thing. Shebin Benson registers well in limited screen time. The production design, while occasionally recalling Hollywood sci-fi a touch too visibly, suits the film’s dark tone.
Anomie is a debut that understands mood, composition, and pacing in its better moments. The storytelling needs to catch up with the craft. A decent one-time watch.