Bhavana plays a young school teacher who looks at pedagogy not just as a means to educate children but also as a way to make them good human beings. Such an approach sees her going to a juvenile home where kids with a criminal past/record are confined and rehabilitated. She takes up the job as a counselor (on contract) and tries to improve the ways of the home, which is managed by a powerless administrator (Nandu) and an irritatingly strict warden (Manoj K Jayan). Vilakkumaram has been presented like a fairytale where this good Samaritan of a teacher tries to go out on a limb to save these children from the warden's abusive ways. On one hand, director Vijay Menon tries to show the sorry state of such "criminal homes" in the country where children are often exposed to sexual and mental abuse, while on the other, he tries to make it look like an unrealistic story that has very low chances of happening in the real world. I appreciate the imagination and the optimism, but when you are making a film on a social topic, you at least need to have some realism. Menon gets too overwhelmed by his "fable". Vilakkumaram is essentially a film led by Bhavana, who along with Jayan, Anjali Upasana, and Nandu, is the only saving grace in the cast. Others are ridiculous in their acting as well as the dialogues they utter, especially the English sentences. Together with elevator music as the background and glaringly low production value, this drama further goes down on the cinematic scale, reaching the opposite of zenith in the climax. But that does not mean it is not worth a watch. If you follow Malayalam cinema and appreciate non-mainstream films, this will be an average affair. There's a good statement in here, and the 5 stars are all for that. TN.
