When Sudhi Maddison began thinking about his second film, he knew he wanted to move away from the familiar. His 2023 debut Neymar, a comedy centred on a dog and headlined by Naslen and Mathew Thomas, had been a commercial success. The follow-up, he decided, had to be an experiment. "I wanted my second film to be something exciting and new. Neymar was a film with a street dog, and I got a real kick out of doing something like that," he says. That search led to Dhoomakethu, a time-loop comedy set around a wedding, which hit theatres on September 25 and is still running. Its protagonist, Lathin Kumar aka Kuttan (Sajin Gopu), is a 36-year-old man who has been waiting for marriage for years. When he finally marries Sharmila (Nikhila Vimal), his wedding night takes a bizarre turn: he is killed by a group of masked men, only to wake up on the morning of his wedding day again.
A different challenge after Neymar
Sudhi had been discussing several subjects with writer Sony, a friend, when the fantasy idea arrived. "When I read the script, it worked really well for me. I immediately told Shyju ikka about it, and he was also very excited. Within the next week, things started moving quickly," he recalls. "The time-loop aspect really excited me. Kuttan is a 36-year-old man who has been waiting for his marriage for a long time. He has a little bit of a past, and his first night never really happens. That was the idea from the beginning," he explains.
What interested Sudhi was less the machinery of the loop than its effect on an ordinary man. He avoided treating it as a scientific puzzle, partly because fantasy has always sat comfortably within Indian storytelling. "When we watch even some of those Hollywood films, there often isn't a specific reason given for why a time loop happens. It's simply a fantasy idea, something that doesn't happen in our lives. But when it comes to Indian cinema, our culture and beliefs have always had space for things like this," he reflects.
The same thinking shaped the comet that accompanies Kuttan's troubles. The once-in-3,000-years phenomenon came from the writer, and the logic was practical. "If you say something happens once in 1,000 years, you can imagine that there would be some history or record of it somewhere. So we thought, let it be an even longer period," he says.
Even as time-loop stories become familiar in Malayalam cinema, Sudhi chose not to compete on complexity. "We wanted to approach it in a grounded way. We didn't want to go into science at all or over-explain the concept. We wanted it to be simple, grounded and rooted in the characters," he explains.
Keeping track of the loop
Simple on screen did not mean simple to shoot. "It was very difficult. Even though the setting is basically a house and the situations are happening repeatedly, we had to make sure the same things happened in the right way each time. At the same time, we had to introduce small changes," he admits.
Someone might move from one spot to another, or an event might land a minute earlier or later, creating what he calls a butterfly effect. Kuttan, too, had to change with every pass. "In the first loop, he gets up and is mostly confused. It's just another day for everyone else. In the second loop, he starts wondering why he hasn't noticed certain things before. By the third loop, he begins to panic. By the fourth, he wants to run away. He wants to escape the situation completely," he recounts.
The second half turns towards investigating why this loop is happening, since the loop alone cannot carry a story indefinitely. "The first half is about Kuttan being trapped in the loop. But in the second half, we have to find a way to break that loop. Kuttan is alone in this problem," he says. The team kept the villain and resolution modest. "We didn't want to turn the film into something complicated or make it unnecessarily intellectual. We wanted it to remain humourous and accessible," he adds.
A familiar team, a new experiment
Casting, Sudhi notes, was never a debate. "I wrote the subject with Sajin in mind," he says. For Sharmila, Nikhila was among the first names considered, and Ganapathi's character was given a deliberately unfamiliar look.
Cinematographer Jinto George has been a familiar figure to Sudhi since his assistant-editing days on Guppy, while he had long followed editor Vivek Harshan's work. "When I got to know that Vivek Harshan would be editing my film, it was a thrilling and emotional moment for me," he remembers.
His own editing background shaped his approach. "Even while writing, I would have an idea of where I could cut something or how I could open a scene," he points out. Working with Vivek, though, showed him the gap between knowing editing and mastering it, as several scenes he loved on set were cut for slowing the film. "The crispness and fast pace of the movie came largely from Vivek ettan's editing," he recalls.
Finding his way into cinema
Dhoomakethu also marks another step on a road that began without a conventional entry point. Sudhi came from a family with no ties to cinema and taught himself editing through YouTube, experimenting on a late 2000s mobile phone. His first stint as an assistant editor was through the Vijay-Mohanlal starrer Jilla, and he later co-directed Operation Java before making Neymar. "I didn't have a direct route into the industry. I was basically trying to figure everything out as I went along," he reflects.
Directing was never the original ambition. "I think that thought came to me around 2017-18. It took me about five years to fulfil that dream," he says. With Dhoomakethu still in cinemas, he is already looking ahead, though he reveals little. "We are discussing the next film, and I hope it happens soon," he says.