You wake up, retrace the same steps, tweak something small, and still land in the same place. That’s basically the appeal of time-loop stories. They take the most ordinary anxieties: being trapped, wanting a second chance to get it right. Dhoomakethu takes that premise and drops it into the middle of a wedding. Lathin Kumar, aka Kuttan (Sajin Gopu), is 36 and finally getting married to Sharmila (Nikhila Vimal) after years of waiting. The film opens on their wedding night. Kuttan is nervous and thrilled in equal parts. Then a bunch of masked men break in and kill him, with Kuttan waking up on the morning of his wedding day thinking it was all a nightmare.
Director: Sudhi Maddison
Cast: Sajin Gopu, Nikhila Vimal, Ganapathi, Manju Pillai, Shine Tom Chacko
What follows is a wedding day which keeps hovering between the ordinary and the bizarre: there is a fly in the tea, a worker falling from a tree, rumours regarding why someone as gorgeous as Sharmila would marry a dark-skinned Kuttan and a rare comet passing above the ground, and so on. Individually, these could be typical elements of a wedding comedy. But when Kuttan starts going through them again, they turn into a pattern. Here, the film efficiently captures the essence of the time-loop genre. Repetition involves more than simply re-experiencing the events; it is about those events acquiring new significance. The repeated phone call, the accidents, the gossip, all of these things gradually become part of a puzzle, and the audience begins to put the pieces together just as Kuttan does.