Okay. Brain is officially soup. Just finished. It's 3:17 AM. I need to type this out before I forget how to feel things.
Shylock.
Jesus Christ.
I’m just sitting here on my couch, the Prime Video menu glowing on the TV like some kind of mocking portal, and I feel… violated? In a good way? I don't know. My heart is still doing this weird pitter-patter thing, like I just ran a marathon. But I didn't. I just sat here. For two hours and twenty-seven minutes. I had to pause it once to get a glass of water because my mouth was so dry, and when I came back, it felt like I was returning to a crime scene I had accidentally created. My cat, Leo, jumped on my lap during that big courtroom reveal and I literally jumped so high I almost sent him flying. No joke. A full-body flinch.
That man. Mammootty’s character, Puthanparambil Abraham. What an absolute monster. For the first hour, I was just seething. I was texting my friend Rahul, like, “Dude, this guy is the worst human being on the planet. He’s suing his own daughter for money? Who DOES that?” I was leaning forward, jaw on the floor, just angry. The way he talks to everyone, that cold, calculated stare. The way he walks around like he owns the very air he breathes. It’s infuriating. He’s not just grumpy; he’s a black hole of empathy. He’s Shylock, right? The title tells you that. He wants his pound of flesh. And you buy it. You completely buy it. He’s this ruthless money-lender, this tyrant, this… this caricature of an evil old man.
And that’s the point, isn’t it? The whole damn thing is a setup.
That one moment. It’s stuck in my head. It’s not even a huge action scene. It’s just a quiet little scene in his office. His son-in-law, Ajayan, comes to beg him, practically on his knees, to drop the case. And Abraham is just sitting there, polishing his glasses. He doesn't even look at him. He just calmly says something about how a debt is a debt, it’s a principle, it has nothing to do with family. The camera is just tight on his face, on his hands, so meticulous, so detached. And I remember thinking, "Okay, this is it. This is the peak of his cruelty. This is the moment that defines him." And I was so sure. So, so sure.
But then… the ending. Oh my god, the ending. My brain did a backflip. A full-on, Olympic-level backflip. The whole movie you’re watching this guy be a Grade-A bastard, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you so hard you get whiplash. The reason he’s doing it… it’s not about the money. It’s not about some twisted principle. It’s about something else entirely. It’s about justice. A different kind of justice. A father’s justice. And suddenly, every single cold, calculated, monstrous thing he did before gets replayed in your head in a completely new light. It’s brilliant. It’s genuinely one of the best twists I’ve seen in ages because it doesn’t just surprise you, it re-contextualizes the entire emotional journey you just went on.
Honestly, though, now that I’m typing this out… was it a *little* too perfect? Like, the way it all wraps up so neatly in the end? I thought I loved it. I was gasping. I was punching a pillow. But now, in the cold light of my living room at 3 AM, I’m wondering if it maybe cheapens the character’s complexity a little bit? For two hours, he’s this fascinating, morally repugnant enigma. And then in the last twenty minutes, he gets this… heroic justification? I don’t know. I’m probably overthinking it. My brain is just scrambled eggs. It was probably perfect. It felt perfect in the moment.
It’s just… that stubbornness. That unshakeable belief in his own path. It reminds me of my grandpa. He had this one thing about coconuts. He would only break them at a specific angle, with a specific knife, at a specific time of day. If you tried to do it differently, he’d get this look on his face. Not angry, just… deeply disappointed. Like you had failed some fundamental test of life. And he’d explain his reasoning, this long, convoluted story about humidity and the alignment of the planets or something, and to everyone else it sounded insane. But to him, it was the only logical way to live. It was his principle. Watching Abraham on screen, that’s the feeling I got. That feeling of watching someone operate on a completely different wavelength of logic, a logic so old and so personal that you can’t even begin to argue with it. You just have to stand back and watch it happen. I remember one time I tried to use a hammer to break a coconut and he almost had an aneurysm. He took the hammer from my hand and looked at it like it was a weapon of mass destruction. He said, “Some things require patience, not force.” And I just stood there, feeling like an idiot. Yeah. That’s the feeling this movie gave me. That feeling of being a kid again, not understanding the rules of the adult world.
And the sound design on Prime Video was surprisingly good. I had my headphones on, and every time that gavel banged in the courtroom, it felt like a crack in my skull. The way they used silence, too. Just long, uncomfortable stretches of it when Abraham is thinking. You could hear a pin drop in my apartment. Or maybe that was just the sound of my soul leaving my body. I don't know.
I’m still so conflicted. I went from hating this man more than any fictional character I’ve ever met, to… what? Admiring him? Pitying him? Understanding him? The movie forces you to do that. It holds your head under the water of your own judgment and then, right when you’re about to give up, it pulls you up and shows you that you were looking at the wrong pool the entire time. It’s exhausting. It’s brilliant. I think.
I need to sleep. But I can’t. I keep seeing his face. That calm, terrible, wonderful face.
Okay. Final score. My brain is too fried for eloquence.
8.5/10.
- Ishaan - decent