Masthishka Maranam Movie Review

Frankenbiting, for those who don’t know, is a trick of reality television where the footage is edited and recut so cleverly that the speakers seem to be saying things they never quite did, emotions are conjured out of thin air, and false truths are spliced together from true ones. There is no more apt concept, therefore, to introduce to begin with when talking about Krishand’s latest outing, since Masthishka Maranam (A Frankenbiting of Simon's Memories) is a film that is completely fixated on the question of whether any memory, no matter how consumed, borrowed, or even lived oneself, can ever be taken at face value again.

Director: Krishand

Cast: Rajisha Vijayan, Niranj Maniyanpilla Raju, Divya Prabha, Vishnu Agasthya, Ann Saleem, Rahul Rajagopal, Santhy Balachandran, Jagadish, Suresh Krishna

In the 2046 that Krishand has in mind, memories are literally extracted from patients in hospitals and sold in cartridges through black markets like bootlegged films, and the film asks, with a lot of wit, whether living someone else’s memory doesn’t ultimately make it one’s own.

Bimal Raj, a grief-stricken father who has allowed himself to become immersed in full-body VR gaming as a means of coping with the loss of his daughter, is our entry into this world, and he is a very ordinary character within an extraordinary setting. Krishand is not so much inventing a future here as he is painting a picture of a present that has simply been allowed more time to unfurl its worst aspects.

Personalised advertising that brings back your dead loved ones to sell you financial services, medical practices that surgically excise painful memories, intimate encounters plundered from the vulnerable and recontextualised for entertainment purposes, it all doesn’t feel like so much imaginative extrapolation as it does uncomfortable prediction.

The film also touches on something that feels quietly prophetic: that by 2046, AI artists have replaced human performers to the point that meeting a real, live celebrity has become genuinely rare. Which makes the whole thing with Frida Soman both clever and emotionally rich, because here is one of the last remaining human stars being absorbed in the most invasive way possible.

As Frida, Rajisha Vijayan delivers a performance you don't easily shake off. The character she plays is at the very heart of the film's commentary, even when she is not physically present, because every conversation, every black market exchange, every courtroom debate ultimately leads back to her body, her image, her personal experience being commodified without her consent.

Masthishka Maranam's interpretation of the male gaze is anything but subtle, but it is well-deserved. Frida's presence in this world has always been determined by how she is seen, not by who she is; her identity is a sort of collectively projected image, and Rajisha understands this completely. What makes the performance so remarkable is the tonal complexity it requires.

The choice to include the item number 'Komala Thaamara' comes with real contextual significance because you realise by then that Frida's body has been a product all along in her career and in the crisis of this film's central situation, and Rajisha never lets you forget that the woman behind that image has her own interiority, her own point of breaking. The courtroom monologue, where Frida basically turns every objectifying gaze back on its owner, is one of the most electrically charged pieces of writing in recent Malayalam cinema, and Rajisha gives it her all.

The film is consistently funny, and it relies on comedy to carry the heavier load. The part where Bimal finds his old moral science teacher in custody for having had the experience of a sexual fantasy in question over five hundred times, literally grinding it into dust, is the sort of darkly absurdist comedy that makes you laugh and then sit with a slightly uncomfortable feeling about why you laughed in hindsight. Krishand's basic premise appears to be that human nature, with its pettiness, its appetite, and its ability to deceive itself, has retained its form regardless of the technology that surrounds it.

In the supporting cast, Rahul Rajagopal has a creepily effective comedic presence as Shaji Mon. Vishnu Agasthya, Ann Saleem, and Santhy Balachandran are solid, with Jagadish and Suresh Krishna dependable as expected. Divya Prabha occasionally veers into the danger zone with the heightened register, and Niranj Maniyanpilla Raju as Bimal Raj is effective in the comedic spots.

On a technical level, this is one of the most ambitious things Malayalam cinema has attempted in a while. The VFX and production design are integrated into the world rather than laid over it. The editing reflects how we consume content now and makes the structural choice feel like a deliberate statement rather than a trend. What this film keeps circling back to, without ever quite landing, is the question of whether anything actually belongs to anyone anymore in a world where the cost of memory itself has a price tag. Masthishka Maranam doesn’t pretend to have any answers. But it asks the question with enough imagination, anger, and humour that you leave feeling glad that it did.