Patriot Movie Review — A Weak Surveillance Canon

A Surveillance Thriller That Watches You Back — But Never Lets You Feel Watched

“Your phone is listening to you” has become a meme of the digital age. Patriot takes that paranoia and asks a far more uncomfortable question: what if the state is listening too? 

When Francis Ford Coppola finished The Conversation in 1974, he was reportedly so unsettled by his own film that he had his home swept for bugs. That is what the surveillance thriller, at its best, does to a person. It crawls under the skin and refuses to leave. Mahesh Narayanan’s Patriot knows the address. It just never quite rings the bell.

Mahesh Narayanan’s latest political thriller arrives wrapped in the irresistible promise of a dream reunion — Mammootty and Mohanlal sharing screen space again. But Patriot is not interested in nostalgia, fan service, or mass moments. It wants to be a surveillance-state drama in the vein of The Conversation and The Lives of Others — a film about power quietly watching from behind the screen.

At the heart of the story is Daniel James, played with weary restraint by Mammootty, a scientist linked to a spyware program eerily reminiscent of Pegasus. Phones become informants. Privacy becomes fiction. Democracy becomes data.

And for a while, Patriot genuinely works.

The first half is tense, atmospheric, and refreshingly mature for mainstream Malayalam cinema. Narayanan stages surveillance not through loud exposition, but through silence — a phone placed face-down, a lingering glance, conversations that suddenly stop when someone enters the room. There’s an old-world paranoia here, the kind that recalls the Watergate-era thrillers where the fear wasn’t explosions, but the possibility that someone was always listening.

Not the reunion you were sold

A half baked reunion that lacks any emotional depth.

If you walked into Patriot expecting fireworks over Marine Drive — two titans colliding in slow motion while the score tells you exactly how to feel — you walked into the wrong theatre. Narayanan made a film about Pegasus. He simply put M&M in it because, presumably, he could. Mohanlal is deliberately, almost defiantly understated. Mammootty plays Daniel with quiet exhaustion and moral fatigue rather than grand monologue. Both performances are disciplined; the discipline is also the problem. Their reunion reads less as artistic confidence than as a screenplay quietly admitting it never figured out what to do with both men in the same room.

Here is the question Patriot never adequately answers: why should we care about Daniel James as a person, rather than as a vehicle for the film’s political argument? Mammootty is technically excellent within the parameters he is given, but stoic and quietly exhausted is not the same as emotionally alive. Daniel is a symbol of principled dissent, played by a great actor, written more as an argument than a human being.

An ensemble left at the margins

Meanwhile, the supporting cast, including Fahadh Faasil, Boban and Nayanthara, never fully escape the shadow of the screenplay’s larger political ambitions. Its like a Supporting Cast Left on the Margins. Fahadh Faasil’s antagonist, in particular, feels underwritten—echoing familiar tropes rather than offering new dimensions.

Informative, not cinematic

A truly political cinema does not explain the surveillance state to you. It puts you inside it. It makes the walls close in. It makes you hold your phone differently when you walk out of the theatre. That’s ultimately Patriot’s biggest issue: it explains surveillance brilliantly, but rarely makes you feel it. Patriot also feels like a film trapped inside its own thesis. There is nothing new being offered. There are folks like Nolan who has taken the surveillance to next level (watch Person of Interest) to know his brilliance.

Still, there’s something admirable about a major Indian film daring to trade spectacle for political anxiety. In an era dominated by algorithm-friendly blockbusters, Patriot at least attempts to ask difficult questions about privacy, power, and the cost of living in a permanently monitored society.

Patriot leaves you somewhere between intellectual appreciation and mild satisfaction — the feeling of having solved a medium-difficulty crossword on a Wednesday morning. You did the thing. Good. Now what?

Verdict - 3/5 (Pegasus with a Malayalam makeover)