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| film Oru Vadakkan Veera Gatha |
The way a story is told is as
important as the story itself, only if not more, no matter how amusing the
subject matter. Even a great story could go down the q-trap if not narrated in
a way appealing to the listener. There are several narrative techniques used in
literature and films, which in order to hold the interest of the reader or the audience,
employ various elements to set a sequence of events in the plot to do justice
to the overall story. ‘In medias res’
is one such technique that is as popular as is effective. Latin for “in the
middle of things”, this is when a book or movie starts in the middle of the
story creating curiosity, and the bygone events are filled in through
flashbacks or verbal accounts. There are several films in Malayalam that begins
in medias res, where we are thrown
right into the middle of action and the root cause of it all comes out only in
time. Following is a list of such movies that brilliantly employ this non-linear
narrative technique, scrambling the time sequence in ways beneficial to the story,
and it doesn’t necessarily mean they are better or worse than each other as
movies in whole, but only in their effectiveness in having started in medias res alone.
