Prathyush Parasuraman

When storytellers say they have made a film to inspire people — red flag! Abort! For the kind of people who make movies to inspire others are, perhaps, those least capable of evoking inspiration — or worse, they feel like they are catering to a baseline stupidity. People aren’t inspired by formulas, or at least people with half a mind aren’t. At best, it can make them simper in theater halls, whacked over their heads with a background score that can even turn a dead man into a pound of goose flesh. But when you return to the thick materiality of your life, you forget that goosefleshing. To truly inspire people, you have to recognise that nothing moves mountains like honesty, like humanity. The best biopics — a genre we are facing a glut in, including Madhavan’s limp Rocketry: The Nambi Effect (2022) — know that ideas can never do the heavy lifting of a life well lived. At best, it can serve as a placeholder.

In the second season of Vadhandhi, M Sasikumar, yet again, takes up the mantle of the “nice guy”—stiff kindness and earnest intention buoying his character through narrative pretzels. Here, he plays Moosa Raaza, a Muslim Investigating Officer (IO) in Madurai—a punishment posting. He cooks, he is kind, he is deeply religious. A namazi who gets to his knees at each of the five bends of the day—in a court, at the police station—his faith is expressed through actions that dot the show’s landscape. He vowed not to shave his beard after coming back from Hajj, in the hopes of his wife conceiving. This rankles his superiors, who think the beard goes against their decorum. He fights them in the court and wins. His wife gets pregnant and is nursing the unborn child elsewhere. These fights and systemic traumas soon recede into the background as the central plot kicks in. Being a Muslim character does not serve any narrative provocation. Instead, two skeletons found when a mound is dug up to build a highway usher in Moosa’s character arc as he is brought in to investigate. He has the full support of his superior SP Rathika (Anagha Maruthora), who not only trusts his intuitions, but takes responsibility every time it backfires.

Love can’t possibly be that bad. Though every time someone proposes in Chennai Love Story—twice, really, but it feels like two times too much—the characters weep as though handed a diagnosis of terminal illness. Their bodies heave, struck by anxiety. They turn away from the lover proclaiming love. They can’t stop crying. Love, really, must be that bad.

Noted film critic Pauline Kael, writing in the early 1970s, argued, “Movies are good at action; they’re not good at reflective thought or conceptual thinking”. A contestable claim, though it might be something director Nissam Basheer resonates with deeply. His films scramble timelines, introduce characters with breathless intention, and jerk into action with a density of information. There is hardly time to step back and take stock of the debris of information—the aftermath. In Rorschach (2022), with a mourning widower (Mammootty) trying to avenge his wife’s murder, it served Basheer well. The relentless unspooling of the film began to feel like a puzzle falling into place—intentions clarified, backstories unclouded, villainy and heroism solidified. In I, Nobody, however, it hollows the film out till it becomes a shell of itself—all rage, no respite. Fatally, the film is spun around a character, without bothering to ask or answer—who is this Rajeevan (Prithviraj Sukumaran)?

Gatta Kushti 2 is, first and foremost, a vast improvement over the first film. There, Veera (Vishnu Vishal), a laundry list misogynist, who desires a wife with long hair and short CV, finds, instead, Keerthy (Aishwarya Lekshmi). She is a champion wrestler who not only has short hair and is more educated than him, but also has the gall to lie about both. They get hitched, and eventually, after the wig falls and the illusions fade, find each other in love. That film’s biggest issue was that in trying to do acrobatics around the story—furnishing plot twists and forced changes of heart at every corner—it forgot to convince us why they eventually fell in love. For example, Keerthy, dogmatically against marriage, melts immediately when Veera refuses a dowry. Is that all it takes? Men, take notes.

It is no coincidence that The Pyramid Scheme, about, well, a pyramid scheme, is set in Haridwar, one of the holiest cities. The show doesn’t quite make the provocative claim of faith being a scam, but it comes as close as one can. It frames scenes of adult mostly-men in crowded halls, enamoured by the possibility of making more money, with that same wide-eyed, ecstatic fervour of a religious gathering, chanting mantras of successes as though hymns.

How many times are filmmakers going to revisit the same crime scene? To what end? Some stories fatigue themselves. After the gruesome terrorist attacks of 26/11, a cottage industry mushroomed. There were films like Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks of 26/11 (2013) so close to the action it felt immoral; Hotel Mumbai (2018), which looked at the massacre from the perspective of those working at the Taj; and Major (2022), a biopic on one of the martyred Majors. Shows, too, cropped up, Nikkhil Advani’s Mumbai Diaries 26/11 (2021), which looked at the massacre from the perspective of those working in the hospital; State of Siege: 26/11 (2020), about the military operation. Dread became cinematic inspiration. Trauma porn, a vision of delight. You need to be an exceptional storyteller to make this story feel worth telling.

In 1957, in Kerala, the world’s first democratically elected communist government took shape. They instituted land reforms that set the landscape bleeding red. The Church was peeved. They saw the Communists as the very embodiment of Antichrist, encroaching on their land. Dijo Jose Antony’s Pallichattambi is set in these ensuing years, where the Christians in the fictional village of Kaaniyaar, on the border between Kerala and Karnataka, strap up, hiring a goon to protect them.