I, Nobody review: a taut everyman thriller that overreaches

Every so often a thriller works best when its hero has no special skills, no plan, and no clue why the world has decided he is guilty. I, Nobody hands Rajeevan exactly that predicament and settles in to watch him squirm.

Rajeevan (Prithviraj Sukumaran) is a secretariat clerk with a stalled marriage and two young daughters, the kind of man who keeps his head down and his opinions quieter. Then he walks into a bank on the wrong morning. Three masked men make off with seventeen crore, he is dragged out as a hostage, and when the getaway ends in a fatal crash, the money is nowhere to be found. Rajeevan survives. That, it turns out, is the problem. The cash has vanished, and the one person left to suspect is the man who lived.

What follows is less a manhunt than a slow public grinding. The police summon him, keep him waiting for hours, send him home with nothing, and do it again the next day. A loud YouTuber-style news channel turns his ordinariness into content. Neighbours whisper, his daughters get pulled into it, and the presumption of innocence quietly evaporates. Nissam Basheer, reunited with writer Sameer Abdul after Rorschach, is very good at this creeping dread. He withholds far more than he explains, and the first hour hums with the unease of a man who cannot prove a negative.

The gun walking into the bank is the hook, and the film knows it. What comes after is where the trouble really starts.

The craft carries long stretches on its own. Dinesh Purushothaman’s camera makes ordinary corridors and stairwells feel faintly hostile, and the action, when it arrives, stays refreshingly human. A cramped scuffle inside an apartment lift is the standout, all elbows and panic and no room to swing. Jakes Bejoy scores it with tunes that deliberately sidestep the usual template, and that freshness suits a film forever trying to wrong-foot you.

Parvathy’s Meera is no decorative wife. The marriage is cold before the film even begins.

Prithviraj underplays beautifully here, letting fatigue and nervous restraint do the work his usual swagger would only ruin. Parvathy gives Meera a genuine arc of guilt, anger and hard decisions, even if the writing could have handed her more room to breathe. The two little girls are natural enough to make the household feel lived-in rather than assembled for the plot.

Where I, Nobody stumbles is in wanting to be several films at once. The tight first half promises one kind of payoff, and the second half goes chasing another, folding in kidnappings, double-crosses and a thread of political satire that is clever in isolation but keeps snapping the rhythm. At two hours and forty-eight minutes, you start to feel the story circling the same block. The climax swaps the heist for a broader point about a system that fails ordinary citizens, and the intent lands even when the emotional punch doesn’t quite.

It overreaches, then, but it rarely bores. As a grounded thriller carried by two actors who take it seriously, I, Nobody earns its ticket, even if it never becomes the knockout its opening hour keeps promising.