At 2AM on a rainy Sunday in June, I sat alone in the centre of my bed—a human island in a sea of thoughts. A couple of hours had passed since the end credits for Aattam (2023) had rolled. Around me, the canned laughter of a sitcom echoed, a novel peeked from under the pillow, my cat stretched like a smile beside it.
None of it lightened my mood. Why had this suspense drama about the sexual assault of an actor in a theatre troupe crawled and settled under my skin? Was it the deep-seated loneliness of being a victim? Or was it the way the film held a mirror to the hazards of being a woman in a male-dominated field? The last time a Malayalam movie left me this deflated was in the middle of the pandemic. Nimisha Sajayan’s portrayal of a newlywed struggling with the conventions of marriage in The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) made me dart in and out of my otherwise beloved kitchen with the haste of someone who had seen a ghost.
Did it make me squirm just a little that both these films had been written by men ? While they captured the emotional weight of the female experience, they also highlighted the paucity of women telling these stories from lived experiences. For decades, when we spoke of I ndian cinema, it was Bollywood’s opulence that glittered before the audience. Now, the same people are seeking Malayalam film recommendations as if they’re searching for themselves in the subtle, celebrated ordinariness of our movies.
But in an industry that’s being hailed for its r.