Many months of anticipation and Covid imposed restrictions later, cinema halls in Kerala breezed back to life with the thunderous reception for big budget Malayalam movie ‘Kurup’, headlined by actor Dulquer Salmaan. He plays the titular role as Sukumara Kurup, a long-absconding conman from Kerala. The movie met the expectations ever since pre-booking started prior to the release. Audience response for Kurup is considered tremendous when the government has allowed just 50 percent seating capacity for cinema theatres to function.
The film is released simultaneously in Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu languages. Kurup has an unparalleled big screen exposure in Malayalam in the post-Covid 19 scene. Kurup was opened to 1500 screens worldwide, whereas it accounts for more than 450 theatres in Kerala alone. An edge-of-the-seat crime thriller, Kurup is touted to breathe life into the ailing theatre sector in the state.
However, the movie hit the marquee despite signing a meaty deal of Rs 40 crores with leading OTT player, Netflix India.
For the uninitiated, Sukumara Kurup is behind the notorious Chacko Murder Case in 1984, where the former conspired to kill a stranger named N.J. Chacko, with two accomplices to his aide, and disguise the corpse as that of himself in order to extort insurance money.
Chacko, a film representative, from Karuvatta in Alappuzha district of Kerala, was on his way home after work, to be with his pregnant wife on their first wedding anniversary. But he never reached home. A charred body was later found inside an abandoned car along the then National Highway 47. However, evidence collected from and near the initially unidentified corpse put Kurup in the dock. No matter what, Kurup remains absconding in the police records ever since, even after the mysterious killing was resolved.
Incidentally, Kurup director Srinath Rajendran was born in the same hospital and time where Chacko’s wife delivered her son. Srinath nursed the dream to tell the screen tale of the notorious criminal for long, and he was after the project for nine long years.
“The mystery about Kurup was around me ever since I was born. My mother was in the same hospital carrying me inside her while Shri Chacko’s wife was carrying her son. The thought of making Kurup struck my mind once I finished my first film. My mind indulged in making this film, and it took me another nine years of my life to finish it up and bring it in front of you,” Srinath wrote on his Facebook page.
Kurup, bankrolled by Dulquer Salmaan’s Wayfarer Films and M Star Entertainments, is made on a whopping Rs 35 crore budget. It was shot across locations in Kerala, Mumbai, Dubai, Mangaluru, Mysuru, Gujarat and Ahmedabad for more than 105 days. Indrajith Sukumaran, Sobhita Dhulipala, Sunny Wayne, Bharath Srinivasan, Shine Tom Chacko, Surabhi Lakshmi, and Vijayaraghavan play other key roles in the movie.
The DQ outing is the first-ever Malayalam movie to have played its trailer in Burj Khalifa in the presence of the actor and his family.
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