Beyond Manjummel Boys: Exploring survival dramas in Malayalam cinema

Chidambaram’s Manjummel Boys has gotten the audience's appreciation and the film fraternity's admiration. Everyone from Anurag Kashyap to Udhayanidhi Stalin to Kamal Haasan has been raving about the film. The numbers do not lie. It is the fastest Malayalam film to gross 100 crores worldwide, as per the makers. While it is undeniable that Manjummel Boys will be one of the finest survival thrillers in Malayalam, it is not the first in the language to ace the genre. Here are five other Malayalam films where the genre was successfully explored—in no particular order.

Malootty

The Bharathan film from 1992 tells the story of a five-year-old girl falling into a deep borewell. It was made at a time when Malayalam cinema had budget constraints and was not as technically evolved as it is today. But Bharathan worked up a great sense of dread from the moment the little girl fell into the well and maintained it throughout the rest of the film. The rescue portions come only in the latter half of the film; what precedes is a family drama establishing the relationship between Malootty (Baby Shamili) and her parents (Urvashi and Jayaram). Venu’s cinematography puts us right inside the borewell and Baby Shamili made her claustrophobia palpable on screen. Malootty is also memorable for Johnson Master’s music. It plays a big part in making everything from the sound of the wind to the thunderstorms feel authentic. It is especially enchanting when an earthworm makes its way down from the little girl’s face.

Malayankunju

In Sajimon Prabhakar’s film, Fahadh Faasil plays Anikuttan, a social recluse who is so obsessed with his work that he cannot even tolerate the presence of a crying baby next door. Early in the film, Anikuttan’s mother places a cup of morning tea so gently near the window of his bedroom, lest it wake him up. Now, imagine the predicament of the man when he has to deal with a wailing child stuck deep beneath the earth when a landslide brings the roof down. Good survival films explore beyond the physical struggles of the protagonists to the metaphysical and existential underpinnings, sometimes in a way that leaves an emotional wallop on the audience. Malayankunju does this effectively while telling a story of personal transformation and serving as an acting showreel for Fahadh.

2018

Jude Anthany Joseph’s 2018 is based on the real-life story of how a state and its people rose up in an hour of crisis. It was a reminder that heroes often come not in spandex but rather in flesh and blood. The film is a masterstroke in storytelling, as it mines real suspense even from a material that everyone in the state is familiar with. For those who went through the harrowing inundation tragedy in 2018, watching its cinematic recreation was like vicariously experiencing it. An example of it is evident most in the sequence where the military airlifts a pregnant woman, in a nod to the real-life incident. A drone sequence showing a man who rows away past a beeline of houses, in part inundated, is so immersive that it defies Malayalam cinema’s budget.

Helen

A bit like Malayankunju, Mathukutty Xavier’s Helen is a film that tells a personal transformation story in the guise of a survival drama. On the surface, it is a real story of how Anna Ben’s titular character gets stuck inside the meat freezer of the fast-food outlet where she works. But at a deeper level, the film is also about how a father reconciles with his daughter and accepts her relationship with a boy from another religion. Like all good Malayalam survival thrillers, especially the recent ones, Helen has such seemingly passing remarks and acts of the protagonists early on that come full circle later.


Virus

Ashiq Abu’s Virus is a story about how the public health department of Kerala tackled the Nipah virus outbreak situation with help from other departments and the state’s people. Featuring many A-listers in cameo roles, it is the epitome of how stars shed their vanity and put the story above everything else. It captures the sense of apprehension that enveloped the minds of Keralites during the Nipah outbreak while telling the story of their great spirit. Suhas-Sharfu and Muhsin Parari’s script has profound exchanges, such as the one where law enforcement and health officers debate whether to cremate a Nipah patient or bury him following the Ebola protocol. A bit like Steven Soderberg’s Contagion, Virus shows how even small actions, like a man picking up a fallen bat, can have such big repercussions as a massive virus outbreak.

Fingers crossed for Blessy’s upcoming Prithviraj Sukumaran-starrer Aadujeevitham to create a new benchmark for Malayalam survival dramas and carry the legacy forward.