Careful is one powerful warning, an unforgettable warning, to be careful in every step you take. Even when, it is a simple step which leads you to a theatre. Inside the theatre, halfway through the assault on the senses that is Careful , you think back on the film’s poster which you had peered at carelessly, but had registered in your unconscious.
The poster itself, commendably, had adequate warnings in it, for the viewers. If you were careful and had paid attention, you would have noticed the U-turn sign on it, a seemingly desperate plea to the unsuspecting viewers to turn back and stay away. It would sound unbelievable, but the entire film is based on an illegal U-turn point on a road in Kochi, where motorists cross over to the opposite side.
At the centre of the story is Rachna (Sandhya Raju), a trainee journalist, who is under pressure from her boss to produce an impactful report. And, by a strange coincidence she lands up at the U-turn, which is the inanimate protagonist of the film. As soon as she starts working on this ‘investigative story’, she lands up in police custody, as the suspect in a murder case. That murder, and some more murders, has something to do with the U-turn.
To put it simply, with Careful , V.K. Prakash attempts to teach the public the dangers of taking illegal u-turns through a highly convoluted thriller story. As the thread of the thriller starts unravelling initially, the viewers wait with the hope that there is something more than that meets the eye. Some more unravelling later, the same viewers would be asking themselves in horror – “Is this really happening? Has someone just made a movie on a U-TURN”? It could also be interpreted as the filmmaker’s intelligence to achieve his purpose – a public service message on the dangers of U-turn. Someone who has endured this torturous two hours of cinema would stay miles away from any illegal U-turns. Well, that indicates the success of the public service advertisement. Careful ranks among the most bizarre movies ever made in the Malayalam film industry.
S.R. Praveen
