Mukundan Unni Associates follows the story of a lawyer whose ambitions rise suddenly after he is fired from his firm. How high will be scale up? The story is a dark comedy and the thing with dark comedies is that its writing should be supremely sharp. It is almost as if the comedy cuts through the second layer while the usual drama does unfold on the top layer. If either of the paths converge then the film would begin to wobble. And this is where Mukundan Unni Associates scores and how! It is one of the most witty black comedies that I have watched in recent times, so effing brilliant! The screenplay standing at a shade above 2 hours does make it a brisk watch that absolutely holds your attention, from start to finish.

The quirky nature of the drama can be seen from the very first frame. Usually other films do have captions about Smoking Being Injurious To Health or No Animals Are Harmed In The Film. But to extract comedy even with those visuals wasn’t easy and full marks to the thought process of the filmmaker to set the tone of the drama very early on. In the very next frame following the ‘Warnings’ above, the full screen is reduced to a square where the drama does unfold. It did take me a while to understand that this signifies his ‘life’. At a point later on in the drama, the screen slowly pulls back to the full screen mode when he wins his first case by tricking his opponent. What a genius of a visual representation, something which would have been more noticeable on the big screen.

The focus is always on the character of Mukundan who is shown to be ambitious, egoistic and a narcissist, present in almost every frame of the film(thus signifying his nature too in a certain way). The frequent voiceovers representing his thoughts was again a risky proposition, which if not done well could have backfired. But this was pulled off so well that it added a layer of dark humour there and then from scene number one. So you are introduced to the lifestyle and daily routine of the protagonist as a part of the world building before quickly getting to the point. So almost within the first 5 minutes he is fired and left on his own to fend for himself. In a clever little metaphor, Mukundan is watching TV that flashes the news featuring a local MLA who was behind firing him, until his mother screams out in the next room that has a snake(indicating that the MLA was a snake). Ahh brilliant! But the writers excel in connecting the dots so well here!

The humour kicks in deftly with the twisted proceedings featuring the twisted mind of the protagonist who picks off from his peer, an illegal way of earning money. This results in a series of sequences which are deliciously dark and engaging at the same time. But there was a tinge of humour that was nicely sprinkled in the narrative. In an instance where Mukundan does cause an accident, watching the car crash sown a hill in slow motion, he himself terms it as ‘poetic’. I found myself laughing hysterically at this and various such other moments like the ones featuring hallucination!

The writers never let go of the seriousness in the drama as a trade of for humour. Both go hand in hand. The twists and turns in the screenplay are pretty interesting without taking the intelligence of the audience for granted. Every time you foresee a downfall, the turn of events do get it back on track. The events leading up to the final act also did have a touch of The Nightcrawler featuring and almost replicating its phenomenal closing sequence but with a different setting. The writing just doesn’t dip throughout its narrative leading up to a tonally correct and satisfying ending. Even the final scene(post credit) featuring the protagonist deleting his modified Aadhar Cards(now that he is 30 instead of continuing to be 29 for over 5 years) with a tagline ‘All Is Well That Ends Well’, was hilarious. So I did end the film with a huge smile thus rounding up the screenplay which was a black comedy for the ages!