With Sambhavam Adhyayam Onnu set to arrive in cinemas on March 6, debutant filmmaker Jithu Satheesan Mangalathu finds himself in what he calls "a run towards the finish". When we speak, the film is in its final stages. Jithu, who hails from Vaikom, first drew attention with a short film titled Sambhavam, released on YouTube around two years ago, and has since garnered over two million views.
That eerie, forest-set mystery ended with a striking twist. A Kerala police officer finds himself in an unexpected walkie-talkie conversation with a Tamil Nadu cop somewhere deep in the forest. As the conversation unfolds, he realises with growing dread that the man on the other end is living in a completely different year, with no sense that over a decade has passed between them.
The new feature grows directly from that seed. "It's definitely an extended version. There are elements from the short film, but apart from that, we are also saying a few additional things in the feature," he says. At some point, he adds, the film circles back to that original twist. "At some point in the film, we do reach that particular element."
The obsession with time-bending narratives, though, goes back further than the short film. "To be honest, I love shows like Dark and Lost. I'm very much drawn to that kind of storytelling," he reflects. "I wanted to attempt something in that space. But the idea was always to make a full-fledged feature film," he says.
The cast includes Askar Ali, Vineeth Kumar and Siddharth Bharathan. "We cast them because we felt they were 100% apt for the characters," he says. "Vineeth and Askar haven't done roles like this before. There's a rawness to their characters." On Siddharth's part, he stays deliberately vague. "He's the most mysterious character in the film." The core of Sambhavam came from an earlier, unmade feature script that had been sitting with him for a while. "In the short film, there's a flashback portion. That was actually the base idea for a full-length feature," he explains. "I had written several scripts for a feature, but none materialised. So I took one core idea from that and shaped it into a short film." The specific spark, he recalls, came from watching a Korean thriller. "There's an element in that film where someone from the past communicates with someone in the future. That idea gave me a big spark," he says.
Genre-wise, the film blends more than one register. "Overall, it can be described as a mix of mystery, fantasy, and horror elements," he says. It isn't conventional time travel, he's quick to clarify. "It’s not exactly proper time travel, more like a time slip with an added element." And there's no political subtext buried underneath any of this, he insists. "It's a straightforward, entertaining narrative. The focus is purely on the story and the genre experience."
The forest setting was as much a budget decision as a creative one. "If we set it in a city and tried to show the passage of ten years, it would require large-scale changes in buildings and locations, impossible on a short film budget. A forest, however, doesn't change drastically over a decade. Budget-wise, it was a safer zone," he explains.
Before any of this, Jithu spent years trying to break into Malayalam cinema the conventional way, and getting nowhere. "I've been trying to enter cinema for over eight years. I was working in a bank. During that time, I tried to get opportunities as an assistant director, but nothing worked out," he recounts. Short films became the only door he could find. "Initially, the short films didn't lead anywhere. So I decided to make something with proper cinematic quality." He never assisted a director before stepping into a feature. "Most projects already have their assistant director teams. Without contacts, it's very difficult to enter those circles. So the only route available was making short films," he admits. Filmmakers such as Girish AD, Alphonse Puthren, Karthik Subbaraj and Lokesh Kanagaraj, who found their own ways around the system, kept him going.
After the short film went up on YouTube, it initially underperformed. Then something shifted. "A Facebook page shared it, and it gained significant reach," he recalls. "Later, some Instagram pages shared it, and one reel received two to three million views." Calls from technicians followed, and eventually, a producer came on board after hearing the expanded version. The title Sambhavam Adhyayam Onnu is deliberate. "This film is set within a particular world established in the short film. This is one chapter of that world. The story has a proper beginning and a proper ending, but if it works well, we do have ideas for future instalments," he signs off.