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Rita (Nayantara) is just paying a final visit to her just deceased
grandfather in hospital when ... she suddenly wakes up in the bed of a
strange man, Sree (Mohanlal), and she has no idea what has happened or how
she even got there - nor has Sree by the way. What's worse though is that
Rita doesn't even have the slightest clue of who she is. And if that wasn't bad
enough, she soon has to find out she is not even all human anymore but her
own spirit, and only Sree can see her. Sree soon takes a liking to the
spirit girl and promises to help her regain her memory and find out
what has happened to her - because the two of them soon figure she just
has to have been murdered. With the help of a journalist friend, Sree
starts a publicity campaign about the disappearance of Rita, but he soon
has run-ins with both a gang of thugs and the police, and eventually he is
even treated with electroshocks against his visions of a ghost girl, with
the effect that he's no longer able to see Rita, and she no longer can even touch
him. But even then, Sree and his friends won't give up trying to find out
what has happened to the girl - and when Sree is almost killed in a fight
and Rita saves his life, their psychic link is reestablished. Eventually,
Sree, Rita and friends piece together her disappearance to the point where
she has visited her dead grandfather in hospital, and she even can
identify the doctor whom she has met at her grandfather's bedside ... and
somehow, Sree manages to drag the man to court for her murder. In the courtroom,
everyone's in for a big surprise: Rita, it turns out, isn't dead at all
but in a comatose state and on life-support in a far away clinic. Sree get to the
clinic ahead of the authorities, and Rita tries to re-enter her body ...
but simply can't for some reason or another ... and Sree soon figures out
why, because she lack the will to live, so he resorts to very drastic
measures: For Rita to save herself he has to disconnect her from all
life-support (and this way kill her), because only then, he figures, will
she be willing to enter her body to save herself ... and what do you know?
It works. And when Rita (the human rather than the spirit) awakes, she and
Sree can finally be united as a normal couple. An Indian film made in
Kerala (heart of the Malayam film industry) rather than Bollywood, this
film differs remarkably little from your typical Bollywood output: It's a
wild mix of mystery, comedy, fantasy, romance, with a bit of horror thrown
in and of course quite some song and dance routines. The result is so-so
at best, a film that despite some unusual plot ideas (an amnesiac ghost, a
murder mystery that in the end doesn't even involve a dead body) stays
remarkably middle-of-the-road, with too few twists and turns along the way
to really remain interesting, with too much romance and sweetness to let
the creepy plot elements come to the fore, and all the comedy the film
contains is a bit too predictable to really work. Despite all this, the
film might not be a total loss, as there are worse ways (and worse films)
to kill your time, but it doesn't hurt one bit to take a pass on this one
either. By the way, this film was often described as a remake of the
Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy Just Like Heaven - which is
highly impossible since Vismayathumbathu was made one year earlier.
Still, the two films are based on the same novel by Marc Levy.
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