Cast: Alexander Prasanth, Darshana Rajendran, Jagadish, Devaki Rajendran, Rahul Rajagopal, Maala Parvathi, Geethi Sangeetha, James Eliaa, Jeo Baby, Zhinz Shan
Director: Krishand
Language: Malayalam
Purusha Pretham (The Male Ghost) opens in a bar where urban legends are spun. Through conversations among policemen we learn about one of their own, whose confrontations with criminals resemble film scripts, as a listener points out. Sebastian, we hear, is the lion that myths are made of, a slayer of dragons, a one-man squad who takes on the most dangerous criminals and vanquishes them.
Cut to reality: Sebastian is none of the above. Viewers are let in on a secret that the force is unaware of: that he embellishes accounts of his encounters with outlaws, manufacturing tales of his bravado even while smartly peppering his stories with occasional mentions of fear so as to make them believable. Add to this some grandstanding when he is on safe ground, some good luck and the criminals’ fear of his reputation, and you might soon understand how he has created such a false impression of himself.
The mythology of Super Sebastian (that’s his nickname) runs alongside the saga of an unidentified male corpse in Kochi in Purusha Pretham. The bonhomie among Sebastian & Co is a cover under which they indulge in corruption and oppression. Both Sebastian and Dileep, his junior, are dealing with challenging domestic scenarios. These threads are braided together to create a somewhat indescribable film drawing on several genres without fitting neatly into any one.
Purusha Pretham is amusing, socially illuminating and unpredictable. Contrary to what the title suggests, it is not a supernatural thriller. The name, we soon realise, is taken from police jargon/slang for bodies that come into their custody. Meshing wordplay with sarcasm and a smashing sense of humour, writer-director-cinematographer Krishand and screenplay writer Ajith Haridas fashion the film into a hilarious take-down of machoism through a not-so-arbit documentation of police work (yes, I’m playing around with words too – #iykyk).
Purusha Pretham is as gloriously kookie and clever as the award-winning Aavasavyuham: An Arbit Documentation of an Amphibian Hunt with which Krishand made waves less than a year back. Once we’ve been introduced to Super Sebastian (Alexander Prasanth) and his colleagues, their daily grind begins on camera. A dead man floats up a water body one day, and two police stations wait for the tide to determine within whose jurisdiction it should fall. Sebastian’s team gets stuck with it, and the body is unclaimed for days before a grieving Susanna (Darshana Rajendran) arrives with her lawyer (James Eliaa), saying she has a “feeling” she knows who it is. Dileep (Jagadish) and Sebastian get embroiled in a mess arising out of this situation, as a result of systemic issues piled on top of their own lackadaisical approach to work.
Purusha Pretham is shot in a film noir style that is sometimes employed to give the narrative a sinister atmosphere but more often as an instrument of irony to deflate the aura that Super Sebastian builds around himself. The latter happens repeatedly when viewers are shown visuals of events while Sebastian is simultaneously heard recounting those events to his fellow police personnel – we can see what (most of) his colleagues cannot: that there is a complete mismatch between those murky low-lit images and his exaggerated or entirely fabricated descriptions of them. This narrative structure automatically elevates the audience to the position of the filmmaker’s confidant at all times, giving Purusha Pretham an air of intimacy that is sustained even when it moves out of closely shot, dark settings to wider frames of open areas in bright daylight.
Sebastian is not the only one who stands exposed before us from the start. Dileep is as morally ambiguous as he is, and the truth he keeps hidden from everyone around him stares at us off the screen. The only one of the three primary characters who remains a mystery until the climax is Susanna. What we don’t know of her is what injects suspense into Purusha Pretham.
Many of these characters’ actions are questionable yet by not being dismissive towards them or contemptuous, the script leaves room for empathy. This makes it possible to be angry along with Dileep about the prejudice he faces as a member of an oppressed caste, while not absolving him for his lies; to laugh at Sebastian’s bragging, recognise his unstated casteist attitude, see that he is capable of both kindness and unkindness, feel for him when he struggles with his relationships and physical limitations; and to assume that Susanna must have had compulsions.
That said, though Purusha Pretham is dotted with interesting women, it never explores them with the detail it gives Sebastian and Dileep. Both Susanna and Sebastian’s girlfriend (a lovely Devaki Rajendran) prove to be crucial to the plot. Public officials played delightfully by Geethi Sangeetha and Maala Parvathi hit the ball right out of the court in their scene together. A number of women are placed in positions of power without blowing a trumpet in this regard – this does not happen often in Malayalam cinema. Yet the script is no more than an observer of these women, whereas it is an involved participant in the workings of Sebastian and Dileep’s minds.
Barring the poor CGI on a corpse early on, Purusha Pretham is a slick production. The shifts in colour palette, lighting and mood are done with clarity, and complement the storytelling. I enjoyed the contemplative tone that sets into a long passage when Sebastian and Dileep travel from location to location for a probe. From shadowy spaces when the narrative emerges into the light, Krishand’s camera sometimes captures a particular grey-blue and grey-green in Nature that harks back to Vishnu Prabhakar’s exquisite cinematography deep in the jungles in Aavasavyuham. It’s curious because these colours and frames do not feel repetitive. Perhaps this is a signature. It would be interesting to see how far this visual refrain goes in future films.
What does not work in Purusha Pretham is the English rap woven into the narrative. It is awkward and incongruous in this setting, unlike the Malayalam rap, which is fun. A pity, since Purusha Pretham’s team is clearly comfortable with English, as is evident from the excellent use of a mix of languages in a courtroom.
It is not often that this can be said about a film: Purusha Pretham’s cast is flawless. Darshana plays Susanna with a blend of enigma and vulnerability that makes it impossible to ascertain whether she is dubious or genuinely broken. She along with Alexander Prasanth and Jagadish are tasked with maintaining a precise measure of likeability even when their characters’ conduct is suspect. Each one aces that requirement. The choice of Purusha Pretham’s lead is a happy reminder that the Malayalam film industry, more than any other Indian industry, does not treat labels like “character artiste”, “comedian”, “hero” as sacred. Alexander is stupendous as Sebastian, a man who lets down his guard before only one person in the entire world.
Purusha Pretham is a police procedural wrapped in satire, but much more than just that. It is as wide open to interpretation as cinema can be. For me, what stands out is the manner in which it demolishes machismo through the medium of a protagonist who, in a single moment, reveals himself to be as human as any human being can be.
The film’s director is unafraid to acknowledge the sources of his inspiration as you will see from the intriguing bibliography appended to the closing credits. He revels in his eccentricity but thankfully does not show it off. And he is funny. Gosh, so funny, in the unlikeliest places.
Purusha Pretham cements Krishand’s position as one of the most distinctive, unconventional new voices to surface in Indian cinema – not Malayalam cinema alone – in recent years.
Rating: 4 (out of 5 stars)
Purusha Pretham is streaming on SonyLIV
Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial
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