Vishal Menon

For a film named after the most fragrant sub-species of sandalwood, there’s a lot of talk about the stench people are forced to live with in Jayan Nambiar’s Vilayath Buddha. The most obvious of these stories belong to Bhaskaran (Shammi Thilakan), the out-of-work politician who cannot reverse his reputation, after he gets caught visiting the neighbourhood sex worker. Then there’s the stench Chaithanya (Priyamvada) wants to get rid off of her for being termed this sex worker’s daughter. She has no identity outside of her mother’s occupation and she fears she too will be seen as one. Then of course is the story of Double Mohanan (Prithviraj), the sandalwood smuggler, who will forever remain a thief to everyone in the hill station of Marayur.

When we meet Aneesh (Roshan Mathew) and Anjana (Zarin Shihab) for the first time, Aneesh refers to this ex-girlfriend of his as… Anjana. They’re meeting after seven long years, after their respective heartbreaks, and yet through their easy comfort, we begin to feel like “Anjana” is still too formal a name for Aneesh to be calling her. It’s the easiest name to shorten to Anju and yet, by the end of this meeting, when we realise Anish’s Anjana has now become Anju again, we cannot remember when this shift happened.

“Ghosting” is not a term one should ever have used casually when you’re in the same room as director Rahul Sadasivan. Not only does this modern master of horror look at the word differently but he’s also capable of writing an entire screenplay based on how he understands this piece of Gen-Z lingo. This understanding is especially relevant given how he’s made another film about three people just like he did with Bhoothakalam and Bramayugam. And If Bhoothakalam used depression as its central theme to discuss generational trauma passing on from grandmother to grandson, Bramayugam used its three central characters to talk about class and caste divide systemic to Kerala.

There are several ways in which Praveen K gets you to think — and then rethink — the de facto norms of a serial-killer thriller. At about the 20-minute mark in Aaryan, the film has already revealed everything we usually wait to be told in stories of this genre. Not only does the setup end with the film plainly telling us the identity of the serial killer, but it also concludes with this person being given the biggest punishment imaginable. With the whodunit element taken away, Aaryan gets the rare chance to focus on the reasons why a person decides to become a serial killer, and the unique modus operandi that has the entire force running from pillar to post.

There’s an argument to be made about the cleverness of the opening sequence of Pradeep Ranganathan’s third outing as hero, Dude. Not only does he deserve an introduction befitting a rising star, but he’s also not at the level where he can save an entire village — at least, not yet. So instead of a grand hero’s entry, what he gets is the absolute definition of a zero entry.

Several aspects of Bison will urge you to keep rewatching the film, but if there’s one that kept surprising me, it was its editing. More than a smooth linear edit, Sakthi Thiru builds up scenes like he’s stacking Jenga blocks. Just when you feel too overwhelmed to absorb the layers playing out in one scene fully, he chooses to insert that with a tiny reaction shot or a cutaway that will immediately take you through the entire magnitude of Kittan’s (played by Dhruv Vikram) journey and how much he’s had to go through to get where he has.

If anyone else had written Avihitham apart from Senna Hegde and Ambareesh Kalathera, the second scene of the film would perhaps have become the first scene. It’s the scene in which the plot revolves around a village drunkard who catches a couple making out in the darkness in one corner of a coconut grove. Like the setup of a film like Knives Out (2019), the film plays out like a twisted investigation as the entire village comes together to find out the whereabouts of this couple, all for the vicarious pleasures of seeing someone else’s family fall apart.