The incident that sets off the plot in Vela is quite a small one, but it branches off in unexpected ways. A man calls up the police control room one night, complaining about a group of youth, including his minor son, consuming drugs on the terrace of his house. A police party gets dispatched, but Ullas Augustin (Shane Nigam), the newbie police officer who had taken the call at the control room, has second thoughts thinking about the minor’s future.
On the ground, Mallikarjun (Sunny Wayne), a senior police officer, has already made a move that would have implications at the personal and political levels. From this point on, Syam Sasi’s directorial debut seeks to build the narrative around the conflict between these two police officers; the upright rookie and the corrupt and criminal-minded senior cop. Yet, it is not an ego clash or a match-up where it is hard to take sides. The lines between them are drawn, and the evil cop lacks redeeming factors.
For a good part of the movie, screenwriter M. Sajas makes up for this lack of nuance in their rivalry by injecting a certain ambiguity into the plot at several points. The attempt is to stay clear of the usual pathways in a procedural film. Control room chatter gets foregrounded in the narrative, with a constant stream of frivolous and fake calls making life difficult for the officers. But it does get repetitive after a point, and things hit a dead end until another long call drives the film towards a laboured climax.
