The film in totality has an innocent feel helped by the child character Nayana portrayed by Baby Anikha and her unlikely friendship and bonding with an aged man with both suffering from issues connected with vision disability are some of the positives from the film. But the movie suffer mainly due to a documentary style of narration adopted for most portion of the second half.
Nayana, the protagonist is a seven year old girl who is highly talented in drawing and painting. But she has colour blindness and this makes her vision limited to black, white and grey. On noticing this defect, her parents take her to a speciality eye hospital for treatment. There we are introduced to an aged and retired IAS officer Kamal Swaroop who looses his vision quite often and is there for treating this disability. The child and the old man develop a bonding and likeness for each other and this is portrayed in the second half of the movie.
Director K N Sasidharan has done his homework in doing the required research in achromatopsia, the vision disability the child faces. But too much focus on that aspect makes the narrative a boring one. This makes it a documentary film rather than a feature film. Also he has tried to explore or rather dwell upon abortion and pass message to the society in a small way. The spoof at reality shows was hilarious but was not at all connected with the film in any manner and was out of place.
Each character have been written and structured well and coming to performances, Baby Anikha as Nayana was the pick of the lot with her innocence and acting skills while Prakash Bare and Mia supported the child as Nayana's parents. Though Anupam Kher did a good job in Pranayam, the dubbing did not synchronise well there. But here there is no such issues as Kher plays a North Indian and hence he has dubbed himself and he acted his part neatly. Siddhique, Kalpana, Jagadeesh, Sreeraman and Saju Podiyan are also part of the supporting casts.
Not much importance has been given to the technical side since it doesn't demand so. Cinematography was ok but edits were rough at times. The song at the beginning when the title credits are shown and sung by Chithra deserves a second hearing.
Overall, Nayana is not the regular commercial film that will entertain you. Even as an offbeat movie, it is not fully convincing and looses the steam with a lengthy (150 minutes) and documentary style of presentation. I will settle with two and a half out of five as my personal rating for the movie.
Rating - 2.5 / 5