Kanal 2015

Set against the backdrop of a global recession in the United Arab Emirates, this thriller traces a tightly wound revenge arc across four lives: John David [Mohanlal], Ananda Raman [Anoop Menon], Raghuchandran (Hilltop Raghu) [Prathap Pothan], and Kuruvila Mathew [Atul Kulkarni]. The story uses a tense, patient tempo to explore how cruelty and longing coexist in people pushed to the edge by economic collapse, and how one calculated act can cascade into a chain of lives forever altered.

The narrative opens with a train journey in which John David and Ananda Raman mingle with other travelers. As conversation spills over, John recognizes Ananda Raman, and a sense of shared past lingers in the air. The train breaks down, forcing everyone to alight and improvise a ride by passing lorry toward a nearby town. That night in a local lodge, John and Ananda Raman swap stories, each man weighing what has driven him here. John, whose past is haunted by a deep, almost desperate attachment, recalls a love from his childhood in Assam—Anna [Honey Rose]—a woman who would later reappear in his life in Dubai. He once believed they might have found happiness, but circumstances and choices pulled them apart. When he encounters Anna again in Dubai, she is married; a painful awareness settles in, even as fate seems to offer him a new chance. He marries Anna after the rituals are complete, a personal victory carved out of years of waiting. But this moment of personal triumph sits beside the larger, looming question of whether love can survive in a world bending under recession and debt.

Ananda Raman’s backstory unfolds in parallel: a Kerala journalist who runs a news channel that prides itself on accuracy, he loans money to sustain a new venture in Dubai. The UAE-wide recession devastates his plans as contractors lose work and visas vanish. His debt multiplies, forcing him to retreat to Kerala, where moneylenders threaten him, his wife challenges the move, and the pressure of debt pushes him toward desperation. He reaches out to Dubai again, hoping to stabilize his life, but the money he needs remains elusive. In a moment of shared vulnerability, he and John converge on the possibility that Dubai’s opportunities might still be salvaged, and their next step becomes a journey toward Karwar, a place where old acquaintances and new temptations mingle in a dangerous balance.

In Karwar, the plot thickens around Raghu and his family. John and Raghu’s daughter had connected on Facebook a year earlier, and a meeting is arranged at a resort that promises to materialize their online flirtation into real-world prospects. A lavish party unfolds, and into the quiet hours of the night, John’s plan solidifies: he coerces Raghu to transfer all the money to a secure account, slamming Raghu with a shocking photo that leaves Raghu and his wife frozen in fear. Their daughter is present and witnesses the moment as the cash disappears from their home. After the transfer, John kills Raghu and his wife, and later, in a chilling moment, records a dying Raghu to send a message to Ananda Raman. The scene then shifts to Ananda Raman in the car, shouting in shock as John reveals his merciless calculus—fate, in John’s view, has brought them to this point. John throws a bag of money at Ananda Raman and disappears into the night, leaving a fragile web of suspicion and fear in his wake.

Meanwhile, a separate thread intensifies around Anna’s fate. An actress is found dead near a train track, her car abandoned to a grim close. Kuruvila Mathew is summoned from abroad to identify the body, a process that pulls him back to India and into CCTV footage that shows a man spending long moments with his wife at home. He informs Raghu of what he has seen, sensing that John may be targeting them next. Ananda Raman, confronted with the murky truth of what is happening, admits he does not know why John acts the way he does, further deepening the web of questions that surround all four men.

As the pursuit narrows, Ananda Raman discovers John tailing Kuruvila. The trio—John, Ananda Raman, and Kuruvila—arrives at Kuruvila’s home, where a tense confrontation unfolds. Kuruvila explains how, during the recession, he and Raghu with their families faced possible deportation. Anna’s father had stepped in to help arrange visas, sparing them a grim return to India, but envy and fear festered beneath the surface. They plotted to murder Anna’s family to loot their money, a revelation that shocks John to his core. John then reveals a personal horror of his own: the family he believes was killed belongs to him—his wife, her father, mother, and four infants—an act that propelled him into a lifelong mission of dark revenge. He had learned the truth through the dead-end trail of money and lies that stretched across continents.

John’s revenge unfolds with ruthless precision. He befriends Raghu’s daughter to gain her trust, then manipulates Raghu’s wife into transferring the money, after which he stifles her in a car, masking the crime as an accident by filling the vehicle with carbon monoxide. He then turns his attention to Raghu’s family in Karwar, dosing Raghu with poison and watching him slip away as he proclaims, “you are finished, John.” John exposes the hidden truth for Ananda Raman: the supposed “accident” that implicated Kazhangam in Anna’s case had been the subject of Ananda Raman’s own channel, which had painted the event as random fate rather than a calculated murder. The entire sequence of events is live-streamed from Kuruvila’s CCTV feed, a cruel public record of the plan that culminates in a case that is eventually dismissed after years.

The narrative closes with a meta-lesson about media and memory. Ananda Raman, now a book writer, publishes Paid News Is Paid Murder, acknowledging John’s influence as both motivator and mentor in shaping the narrative that courts and publics will remember. The ending rests on a quiet, deceptively ordinary train journey that hints at the enduring, unresolved tension between truth, vengeance, and the cost of living in a world where money and power can rewrite fate. The final image lingers on the idea that stories like these never truly end; they simply ride the next carriage into another chapter.