Kooman teaser: Jeethu Joseph’s next investigative thriller has Asif Ali in hunt of an elusive criminal

Drishyam director Jeethu Joseph is all set for his next investigative thriller titled Kooman, which has him teaming up with Asif Ali for the first time. The teaser of the film, which also has Renji Panicker, Baburaj, Hannah Reji Koshy and Nandu, was released on Friday through the team’s social media pages.

The video hints that Asif Ali’s character of a police constable, who is in the final days of his service, is assigned the task of retrieving a suspect who seems to have got loose from custody. The snippets also show that the protagonist as well as the police force have been enduring a tough period, making it all the more necessary to capture the ‘elusive criminal’.

Renji Panicker and Baburaj play senior officers in the movie, which also has Baiju Santosh and Abhiram Radhakrishnan in pivotal roles. The sequences also throw up questions about whether the constable is on the hunt for the criminal or vice versa.

The movie is scripted by KR Krishnakumar, who had earlier written Jeethu’s direct-to-OTT mystery thriller 12th Man that had Mohanlal in the lead. Kooman’s release date is expected to be in November and it will mark Jeethu’s first theatrical release in Malayalam since Mr and Ms Rowdy in 2019. The filmmaker, since then, has had three OTT releases and two theatrical films in Hindi and Tamil.

In an earlier interview with OTTplay, Asif told us, “It’s a trademark Jeethu Joseph film. It’s a thriller and there’s an investigation angle to it. But it’s different from his previous movies in the sense that it has a rural backdrop of a village that is on the border of Kerala-Tamil Nadu. I play a police constable in the movie. The incidents that happen in his life and how its consequences form the plot of the thriller.”

Meanwhile, Jeethu recently concluded shooting Ram’s UK portions and the team along with Mohanlal is set to fly to Morocco and Tunisia next.