Ode To The West Wind

 I watched the Malayalam movie Dies Irae recently, and honestly, I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it. It's one of those films that sits uncomfortably in the middle—not bad enough to regret watching, but not good enough to recommend enthusiastically to friends either. You know that feeling?  The Excess Problem Look, I get it. Sometimes smoking and drinking are part of establishing a mood or showing us who a character is. But Dies Irae takes this to another level entirely. The characters smoke constantly—like, in almost every scene. At first, I thought maybe it was meant to show something about their state of mind or lifestyle. But after the tenth or fifteenth cigarette, I started wondering if someone on set got a really good deal on prop cigarettes. The drinking scenes were the same story. Everyone's perpetually holding a glass of something, and honestly, it started feeling less like character building and more like filler. I found myself thinking, "O...