Pinneyum is certainly not Adoor’s best visual expedition, but like his earlier works, the film tries to explore the human psyche through a very ordinary narrative technique.

Pinneyum is certainly not Adoor’s best visual expedition, but like his earlier works, the film tries to explore the human psyche through a very ordinary narrative technique.

Pinneyum is clearly the work of a maestro who has nothing to prove: undemonstrative but staggeringly impactful.

Dileep and Kavya Madhavan present subtle performances and can be considered the only saving factors of the film. Nedumudi Venu, Vijayaraghavan and Indrans also do their parts well. However, with regard to the two teenage actors in the movie, the less said, the better. There is nothing incomprehensible to a lay viewer in Pinneyum, but the intensity and sub-texts one looks forward to is also missing.

On retrospect, ‘Pinneyum’ strikes us as little more than a sentimental pile of overworked emotions. Clearly not a film that one would expect of Adoor, it’s an ineffective reformulation of a familiar theme that gets lost between cinematic genres.

Pinneyum ends up as unintentionally funny and inane to the core. It’s better if this one is forgotten as a bad dream.

Pinneyum is almost an anachronism in 2016 and lacks everything that makes his old classics an engaging watch even today.