Rifle Club

In Aashiq Abu’s Rifle Club, manliness is next to godliness. It’s set in a hyper-violent world with no room for peaceful resolutions or around-the-table diplomacy. An eye for an eye is the only diktat, and it’s the meanest, most frenetic Western you’re likely to see from one of our Southern-most states. It takes place in 1991 and this gives the film a pre-woke recklessness that’s rare in a film set in today’s time. Instead, the film’s allegiance to machismo is so on-the-nose that it doesn’t even try to hide the many phallic symbols that “rise” from subtext to text. In a chilling scene, when an outsider asks Itty (a killer Vani Vishwanath) if he can speak to the man of the house, she forces him to look down, pointing at her loaded pistol. This is not your average household in which women are valued based on their looks or their ability to cook. For members of the Rifle Club, what matters most is the ability to shoot, gender notwithstanding.

From the times of black-and-white, we have often seen a wife act coyly around her husband when sharing the news of their impending pregnancy. There is the bashful eyes, shy demeanour, and lines like the veiled “Now, I have to eat for two people” or the direct “There is a new entrant coming to the family” before breaking into a smile and a hug. In Aashiq Abu’s insanely entertaining Rifle Club, the sassy Sicily tells her husband Avaran, “Bring me the liver of the wild boar you are going to hunt. I heard it is good for pregnant women.” These are the kind of characters that inhabit the world created by Syam Pushkaran, Dileesh Karunakaran and Suhas. Characters who might seem like a weapon-wielding Addams Family to the rest of the world, but within their self-sufficient existence, this is the normal.

Dead wild boars and gun-toting humans floating down a zip line from inside a forest to a bungalow, dinner conversations replete with tall tales of hunting and backhanded compliments, residents for whom the gun is the one, and probably only, thing that matters in their lives — this is the world in which Aashiq Abu’s Rifle Club is set. It is a closed world with strict honour codes, which doesn’t bar the characters from mercilessly lampooning the incompetence of someone else in the club. And, almost all of them belong to the same family.