22 Female Kottayam

Malayalam movie world is now undergoing a transformation in the hands of a bunch of new people and Ashiq Abu is one among them. After his Salt N Pepper, his directorial venture is 22 Female Kottayam. The name itself had something which urged me to watch this movie. The cast include Rima Kallingal, Fahad Fazil, Prathap Pothan, Sattar,  and TG Ravi among others. The movie makes us leave the theater with a wounded bleeding conscience and a tight slap on our pseudoegos.

Tessa K Abraham(Rima )is one of thousands of nurses working in Bengaluru. She like any other ladies from Kottayam, a town in Kerala where each household boasts of at least 1 NRI nurse, desires to go abroad. Though her friends make use of a wealthy businessman by the name DK (Sattar) by giving earthly pleasures and in turn taking back money and other favors, she decides to stay away from such things. She meets Cyril (Fahad Fazil) working with a Visa Consultancy and he gets her a visa for Canada. As a return gift she offers him treat, and then one thing leads to another and soon she moves to stay with him. Hegde (Prathap Pothan) a wealthy business man who had met Tessa earlier and a friend of Cyril, now frequents Cyril and Tessa's place on pretext of eating good Kerala food. One night after an altercation in a pub, Cyril goes missing and Hegde comes with message Cyril had altercated with some local party people and so has gone into exile for 2 days and to her shock Hegde asks her to have sex with him. A brutal rape follows, never has been in a Malayalam movie, a rape so painfully depicted. It leave us with a bleeding soul, and poor Tessa with broken skull and fingers, with bruises all over. But she decides to forget everything and start afresh. But weeks later the same thing is repeated and we feel nauseous. This leaves Tessa shattered and she decides to fight back. Cyril who is joined with Hegde and actually had taken money from Hedge for Tessa, helps in getting rid of her by placing drugs in her bag. Only when being carried away by police, she comes to know that Cyril was in the plot against her. In jail Tessa was initially feeble but later on decides to take revenge. With the help of an inmate Subaida, she comes out and Subaida arranges help for Tessa through her friend Dinesh. It is the same Dk and he tells Tessa nothing comes free. The advice given by Subaida is the strongest weapon a women has is her weakness, and to use it wisely, rest of the movie deals with revenge.

Every actor has done their part quite well, not much cast but each did their part really really well. Rima as an innocent nurse, Cyril seductor, still naive looking, Hegde the innocent way he asks can I have sex with you, coolly, DK who never wants his female partners to regret the pleasure he gets..Not a feminist movie but surely will leave us think with guilty consciousness, how we treat a rape victim, how the sexual harassers walk free in the society, overall a different experience.