Pawan Kumar’s Malayalam-language Dhoomam has a twist-heavy plot, strong performances by Fahadh Faasil and Roshan Mathew as well as the flavour of a feature-length public safety announcement against nicotine consumption. Indeed, health ministries the world over will applaud the fate that awaits Avinash (Faasil), a marketing maven whose talent for spin lands him a plum job at a tobacco company.
Avinash’s unscrupulous tobacco evangelism, encouraged by his boss Sidharth (Roshan Mathew) and Sidharth’s uncle Praveen (Vineeth Kumar), vastly improves the company’s bottom line. When Avinash and his wife Diya (Aparna Balamurali) become the victims of a mind game orchestrated by a mysterious voice on the phone, it’s not hard to guess why Avinash is being targeted.
Pawan Kumar, whose credits include Lucia and U Turn, channels the conventions of the man-on-the-run film for Dhoomam. The shared agony of Avinash and Diya unfolds over flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. The backing and forthing creates a sense of intrigue that somewhat leavens the inevitable finger-wagging that awaits us.
There are times when Dhoomam feels like a 143-minute expansion of the advisories against smoking that are included in films with characters puffing away on their cancer sticks. As a meta-touch, there’s a shot of Yash’s anti-hero Rocky from the film K.G.F, which shares with Dhoomam its producer, Hombale Films.
Dhoomam wants you see the dark side of big tobacco, which includes glorying smoking to boost sales. But the film is simply too long and too obsessed with neatly tying up all its plot strands to deliver its message efficiently. Smoking proves to be truly injurious to the health of some of its characters, not to mention hard on the viewer’s posterior.
While the suspense wears thin as Avinash’s agony prolongs, Kumar has fun drawing parallels between the health hazards of smoking and the terrible fate that awaits Diya if Avinash fails to find a solution. Scenes designed to grab you by the throat sit along needless exposition. The farcical tone of the Hollywood production Thank You For Smoking or the subversive allegory of Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking is missing in a humourless, unrelenting thriller.
While Fahadh Faasil is typically riveting as an opportunistic man forced to grow a spine, Roshan Mathew is compelling too as Avinash’s profit-addicted boss. Some of the movie’s most deftly written sequences are at the tobacco company, where amoral sales talk acquires a sinister veneer. The company’s board room even has a table that resembles a coffin.
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