Have you ever felt that to be successful we need to have Hard Work, Dedication, Perseverance, and Dedication? But also, we should be smart – cunning smart? I mean, fox-like cunning smart? Well, this movie, Mukundan Unni Associates, shows what it takes for a person to be a fox and how it turns out to be is what the entire plot is about.
DISCLAIMER: There shall be no spoiler in the article but since a parallel between this film and Nightcrawler has already been drawn, you might get a hunch in which direction the film goes if you have already watched the latter. Yet I haven’t revealed any scene/situation from the film under discussion.
This article is merely a comparison between the protagonists of MUA and Nightcrawler and how similar they are yet so different.
Mukundan Unni is a lawyer who likes to be successful before he turns 30, yet he was fighting for hand-to-mouth even at 36. Due to certain circumstances, he gets to know how a normal working class was able to “afford” huge hospital fees, in case of emergency. So, he wanted to follow the same route and be successful and rich – filthy rich. This film has a strong resemblance to the 2014 Dan Gilroy directorial, Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, and others.
Both the protagonists from MUA and Nightcrawler are street-smart. They know their way out, they achieve anything if they set out to do something, and both are high-functioning sociopaths. In MUA, Mukundhan Unni is a struggling lawyer who wasn’t able to set up his practice at the beginning of the film. In Nightcrawler, Lou Bloom is a hustler who didn’t have any stable job to make ends meet at the beginning.
The story starts to progress when Bloom stumbles upon freelance journalism and once he becomes a stringer, we get introduced to different turns and twists. Similarly, once Unni knows how a patient at the hospital pays the bill, he takes up all MACT (Motor Accident Claims Tribunal) cases which leads to twists and turns in the film.
Both the characters have no remorse for the sufferers, all they see is a business – business in others’ misery. And both impact the entire “industry” as the outsiders who disrupted it with their “unique” methods.
The psyche of the protagonists is pretty straightforward. They are not mentally unstable nor they are seeking some revenge by indulging themselves in this line of business. Their goal was simple – to be successful and rule (their) world. They both maintain a stoic face throughout the film but internally they emote every second of their lives inside their head. They react only when someone/something comes in their way. They give a look as if they are about to wage a war against the whole damn world.
With so many similarities, one can easily comment and say, “MUA is a rip-off from Nightcrawler, brooo..! Jake Gyllenhaal has ripped the role apart broooo..! Dan Gilroy FTW broooo…!” But with all due respect to those people, “It’s coz people like you, the characters like Lou Bloom and Mukunda Unni exist, you douche-moron! You spell ‘Gyllenhaal’ as ‘gil-en-hall’ and you talking about Jake’s acting! You don’t even know the other works of what Gilroy has done yet say that he is THE BEST SH*T EVER! Imagine you encounter a stringer who alters the crime scene to get a ‘perfect capture’ and when it is time to pay the hospital bills, a middle-aged lawyer pops up from nowhere and takes your thumbprint on the vakalat to ‘pay the bill’. Imagine that and then let’s talk, pretentious prick” is what I want to say but I shall keep it internally to myself and work on the things that need to be done with a straight face.
This movie, MUA, is a very tight script with no/rare loopholes that deserves a watch and an appreciation for the way it was made. As the story progresses, it had four possible endings (at least that’s what I was thinking parallelly while watching it) and three of them go to the regular template of cinema and only one ending breaks the conventional format. I was thinking to myself, I’ll be heavily disappointed if it had any of the first three endings but I was immensely satisfied with how the film ended. So yeah, the director took the fourth route. 🙂
Speaking of the director, Abhinav Sundar Nayak has helmed the project while he and Vimal Gopalakrishnan wrote the story. They had done a fantastic job of keeping the characters real, in terms of their philosophy, their thought process, and their approach, and kept the viewers hooked throughout. Cinematographer, Viswajith Odukkathil, has set the tone of the film right and his framing was too good – the way I usually visualize for my film (if I make it). I think me and him shall be good work friends (my cue to be friends with him :D). Abhinav (the director) was earlier an editor before this film, so naturally, he co-edited MUA alongside Nidhin Raj Arol, and the way the cut the shots was so cool to watch. It almost had that indie neo-noir vibe.
The multi-talented Vineeth Srinivasan, who is a director, writer, singer, lyricist, screenwriter, and of course an actor, has totally owned the film and the character of Mukunda Unni. It was so surprising yet somehow made sense to see such a smiling, soft-spoken actor who is known for boy-next-door roles to be able to do this shady, cunning, fox-like role and pull it off with ease. Guess, Srinivasan’s (his father and a legendary actor) genes have some role in his son’s acting chops. My friend, MSB, who is an ardent fan of Vineeth will be super proud of him in this character. The film had Suraj Venjaramoodu, Aarsha Chandini Baiju, and Sudhi Koppa who all aced their respective roles. One line about Aarsha’s character Meenakshi would be that Unni and Meenakshi are made for each other (all puns inclusive and subject to your understanding).
Films like these make me want to do an LLB degree just to know the ways of the laws and their functionality, not to safeguard myself from being prey to the predator but to be a predator itself. Crazy, isn’t it? Then watch Mukunda Unni Associates right away.
There is this old saying: Money cannot buy you happiness.
Well, a new saying of something this sort is making rounds: Money can’t buy happiness but it buys things that make you feel happy, which is essentially the same thing.
Unni and Lou belong to the new world and hopefully, me and you shall be in that same world because we, humans, are all gray. But sometimes, we are black. Let’s maintain that blackness to “sometimes”.
