Hardly a month has passed in recent years without the Malayalam film industry producing a police procedural. M. Padmakumar’s Uyir, this month’s offering, is based on a real-life story and is also co-written by Shaji Maarad, a police officer, along with Nikhil M. Menon. Perhaps there is something about the variety of uncommon situations that the police force deals with on a daily basis that makes more officers turn to screenwriting.

The makers of Uyir have the advantage of working with a remarkable real story, with the possibilities of playing around with a plethora of human emotions. Unfortunately, it has not translated well on screen. After the body of an unidentified woman surfaces in an abandoned well, Ajeeb Rahman (Roshan Mathew), who is on probation as a sub-inspector, keeps tailing the leads across the multiple States. What on first impression seemed like a case of suicide soon turns out to be something far more serious with various strands.

M. Padmakumar, who has a commendable body of work including Vasthavam and Joseph, takes an unhurried approach to the crime, beginning with the personal trauma of the officer, which has now become a staple of most police procedurals. But in Uyir, the trauma part returns to the narrative only towards the end when a faint connection is drawn between the cause of the trauma and the case that Ajeeb is investigating.

The treatment of the film is such that at no point in the story does any of the revelations hit you hard, even when some of them are shocking enough. The writing has to take some of the blame for this. The same problem was visible in Paathirathri(2025), another police procedural scripted by Shaji Maarad. One of the strangest choices is the depiction of the different versions of a story by an unreliable narrator. When the story remains almost the same in the second narration with just an interchanging of characters, a quick montage would have conveyed the point, but the makers choose to go for a laboured re-enactment of the entire sequence at the same pace.

The screenplay is so structured that neither the shock of the crime or the emotions of the human story gets adequately conveyed. The dated approach that mars Uyir is also evident in the use of songs at the most inopportune moments in a film which really does not need any. The uninspiring background score further adds to this dated feeling. Roshan Mathew manages to convey the eagerness and vulnerability of a rookie police officer, but there is only so much that any of the actors can do in a film that does not provide them enough material to work with.

With its unimaginative and dated approach, Uyir does not break any ground and ends up as a run-of-the-mill police procedural.