Premise:  Anupama Parameswaran is a middle class girl who gets introduced to pub culture. Boozes too much out of excitement and becomes pregnant without her knowledge. COVID lockdown is implemented by the time she gets to know about it, how she tackles her tough situation forms the remaining story.

Writing/ Direction:  The contrast between the starting point of the conflict and how it gets resolved is hard-fitting, showcases a woman who gets pregnant without consent is sadly pushed to say yes to sleep with a doctor who helps her to abort the baby. But unfortunately, the emotional baggage is not fleshed out well anywhere in the flow, mainly due to the outdated filmmaking. It's been a while since the movie was shot, but it is not that old to put the blame on release delay to justify the amateurish quality as the story revolves around corona lockdown. The screenplay is so random right from the very first scene, we get some so-called ‘Area Pasanga’ obsessed behind the heroine for no reason, a separate track involving Livingston kept for namesake to convey the pain of an eloped daughter’s parents but has nothing to do with the story. We have seen many movies conveniently using COVID-lockdown as subplots to bypass writing, but this one solely depends on the above mentioned factor. The whole second half revolves around what difficulties the public faced as if the virus was some sort of a joke to just make people sit inside their homes. Many serious situations land in a funny way due to the choice of words, timing and dialogue delivery style. The flow is extremely predictable and hence the situations lack the tension, the blunt characterization of the female lead is another reason why the film lacked a proper emotional connect. The climax message is out of nowhere, that too in the preachy text form, it had no correlation with the path the film was travelling on for the whole, and it felt forceful just to send the audience out of the cinema hall with some sort of caution.

Performances: Solid performance from Anupama Parameswaran, she has truly owned the seriousness of the subject and has played it accordingly through her innocent yet gutsy body language. Charlie and Nirosha have ample screen time, but their characters did not really step up the story at any point. Actor Rajkumar plays a key role, but for some bizarre reason he did not dub for himself which made his portions so weird. Plenty of bad casting choices for the supporting roles, the doctors talk as if they are straight from a serial, most importantly the girl who came as the heroine's friend throughout the movie spoiled the drama at many instances with her inexperience.

Technicalities:  Nothing impressive in terms of music both with respect to songs and as well as the background score, pathos areas literally sounded like stock queues instead of being organic. Routine camera work with no inventive angles, by just following the old-school type shots throughout. Pretty straightforward editing and plenty of lags in many scenes, also there was a lot of scope to trim certain chunks of portions.

Verdict: An important story arc that deserved to be made, but told in an incoherent way that one would be wondering what the film is trying to convey. Except for Anupama Parameswaran’s earnest performance, it is certainly a tough watch.

LOCKDOWN - Amateurishly made message-heavy flick!