Kishkindha Kaandam - choose your own reality

 

Kiskindha Kaandam

2024, Malayalam

Writer/Director: Bahul Ramesh

Stars: Asif Ali, Aparna Balamurali, Vijayaraghavan, Jagadish

Mohan's Measure: ⭐⭐⭐

Let me start off by saying that Kishkinda Kaandam is finely crated and superbly acted movie, which deserves the accolades it has received.  But, frankly, the story feels like a jigsaw puzzle badly put together; it could easily have fallen apart.

Critical to the movie is  the character of Aparna Balamurali.  She is supposed to be a new bride entering the home of a shady family.  But, instead of fear and uncertainty, she acts like a CBI agent, breaking into locked rooms, hunting through desks and cupboards, piecing together evidence.  She walks about as though she knows the place, the woods surrounding it, even the people there.

While Mr. Asif Ali's character offers some depth, he seems to be like a stranger in his home.  He fumbles around the premises and hardly spends anytime with his family. How is it that his new bride knows more things about the goings on in the house than he does? 

We come to know almost without notice that he was married in the past and had a child.  Where the child is becomes the subject of the film.  But, all of this is taken almost as matter of fact.   We feel like we are walking in late, interrupting a deep conversation that is about to conclude.

The only one whose character and method acting makes any sense is Vijayaraghavan, with his bouts of derealization, his sudden moments of rage, and his calculating, autistic-like obsessions.  He is ex-military, and that partially explains it.  But, yet again, we are left in the lurch as to exactly what his condition is.

 There is something abrupt about the way the movie ends, too, a self-created purgatory. It suggests a moral dilemma that cannot be resolved.  But, we as an audience feel more could be done.