Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life Review: Desert Drudgery
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Najib is an ordinary, hard-working man with a beautiful wife and a baby on the way, elated to land a job in Saudi Arabia. He arrives in the Gulf country with nothing but a small bag and a head full of big dreams. However, his hope to turn his fortune around is dashed when, due to a language barrier, he is picked up by the wrong Arab at the airport and forced into the hard, laborious life of a goat herder in a harsh unending desert.
Directed by Blessy, the 2024 survival drama “The Goat Life” is based on the best-selling Malayalam novel “Aadujeevitham” by Benyamin, which is inspired by real events. Prithviraj Sukumaran plays the protagonist, Najib, who is trapped and enslaved in the desert. The fact that he speaks nothing but Malayalam makes his attempts to escape twice as hard.
With a 2-hour 50-minute runtime, “The Goat Life” is an ambitious film that turns out to be almost as dry as the desert it is set in. It’s Prithviraj Sukumaran’s incredible transformation as Najib – from a healthy, hopeful man to a bony, scraggy slave with vacuous eyes – that keeps the viewer invested in the film until the end. Much of “The Goat Life” is repetitive, whether it’s Najib constantly failing to communicate with anyone who can help him, herding goats, or making attempts to navigate a desert whose geography is alien to him. His hardships are predictable, and the supporting characters/actors do little to elevate the monotony of the scenes, yet you want to know what happens to Najib in the end. How does he find a way out? How does his escape plan work? What kind of hurdles does he meet?
A few flashback scenes to Najib’s life in Kerala with his wife Sainu (Amala Paul) serve as a brief respite from his constant hardships in the desert but don’t have much of an emotional impact. Director Blessy uses some cleverly artistic transitions to switch between the present and the past. For instance, a flashback shows Najib and Sainu blissfully rolling around in a muddy riverbed, and that scene of the mud slowly transforms into a dry, arid desert area in the present, where Najib is lying on the sand, desperate, lost, and lonely. Some of the desert scenes have a near-Biblical quality, especially as a worn-out, emaciated Najib resembles a doomsday prophet nearing his death. A few viewers might even be reminded of the “Dune” movies, given the vast expanses of unforgiving sand on display.
“The Goat Life” could have easily been condensed to a 2-hour runtime, or the creators could have been bolder in the execution of Najib’s painstaking ordeal in the desert. They are also unable to establish moving emotional bonds, so the climax feels abrupt and doesn’t hit you the way you’d expect a survival drama to. In contrast, the Malayalam movie “Manjummel Boys” excels at establishing human connections between its protagonists, despite not having a romantic sub-plot.
If there’s one thing the film does well, it is conveying the stark differences between the expectations and the reality of leaving one’s home country in pursuit of a better life. Many Indians like Najib, who come from modest, poor economic backgrounds, with little or no education, are easily misled, waylaid, and exploited in foreign countries as underpaid workers or worse – unpaid slaves. With a reliable star like Prithviraj Sukumaran helming the film with an excellent performance, “The Goat Life” is made watchable despite its dragged-out runtime.
Stream the film on Netflix.
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