Ekadesham is Don Palathara's new film.
It screened at the Dharamshala Film Festival 2026.
The meta-cinematic foray stars Roshan Mathew, Divya Prabha, Jitin Puthanchery and Aarsha Baiju.
Meta movies are tricky. The balance between sincerity and showiness is a constant negotiation. To what point can the filmmaker hold up to view the skeins of their work? When does this authorial mischief skid over into an unanchored experiment? Among India’s most consistently surprising, striking filmmakers working today, Don Palathara’s latest, Ekadesham (The Uncertainty Principle), is a vivid, scrambled drama, flitting between the folds of life, art, ambition, wishfulness and failure.
Celebrating its Asia premiere at the Dharamshala Film Festival, the film doesn’t always stay grounded but remains curious, exploratory and eager to gauge its ruptures. Movies charged by a spirit to peck at their own edges are always an exciting proposition. Even their shortcomings reflect daring.
Ekadesham is about the twine of relationships as an interruption between life and cinema. It’s about the transfers from one to the other. These can be fluid, fragmented and messy. Palathara is constantly reminding us of the mediations in what we are witnessing. Everything is constructed and yet also loose and languid. We meet Sharath (Roshan Mathew), who’s narrating his vision for his next film to his rather disinterested partner, Nimisha (Aarsha Baiju). She’s absentminded, while he stresses the inevitable hurt in relationships, human versus AI in art. Ekadesham leaps between the real-life concerns and anxieties of its characters and the contrived situations in Sharath’s own film. The primary two equations at the heart of Palathara’s film have gotten into muck, a stalemate. Sharath and Nimisha frequently clash. She’s the breadwinner in the household. There’s chafing between the couple over how much she can indulge his filmmaking pursuits. He forgets groceries. She mocks the exclusivity and brilliance that artists and filmmakers claim. The two are at that point in a relationship where the niceties quickly paper off and accusations are readily slung. Efforts at maintaining polite facades instantly shatter.
We move among fragments of Sharath’s narration. Characters of his film emerge: Shreya (Divya Prabha), an assistant director in Kochi with dreams of helming her own film someday, and Alan( Jitin Puthanchery), a budding actor who has only done few minor roles. Palathara isn’t interested in a sharp presentation. The artifice juts out. Borders dissipate. The same actor (Aarsha Baiju) even pops up in two roles, as Sharath’s partner and the actor he later meets to cast. Nimisha herself has acted in few projects. All facets are meant to be ruffled, poking through corners. This is a film that lopes to its own rhythm. Sharath seeks to catch the tenor of everyday lives in his film. Ekadesham imitates that spirit. Palathara’s camera never loses sight of the larger hubbub with which a speck of few lives unfolds. We watch streets dart to life, people going about their day. Shreya is confident at work but a childhood trauma stymies her relationships with men. She’s locked in a doomed one with a married man who slurs her later where she’d get such a sugar daddy when later she does take a stand for her dignity. She fiercely values her independence but delays pressing decisions.
The film keeps reshuffling, restless to try and widen its parameters. A hotel scene abruptly loses colour for a few minutes. Palathara is operating in a different vein here. The beat is more energetic, abandoning the rigorous control and sedate precision of prior outings like Family (2023) and 1956, Central Travancore (2019). Both Shreya and Alan are drifting around. Shreya is in and out of PGs and friends’ houses. Alan is on steadier turf, but he’s desperate for a big break. Palathara cheekily takes a stab at everything, including a wink at his own earlier film with Puthanchery, Joyful Mystery. Prabha’s Cannes success with Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix winner All We Imagine As Light (2024) finds an echo in a future thread where Shreya charts similar glory. The self-reflexive slant extends to behind-the-scenes glimpses of scenes between Sharath and Nimisha. There’s a stealing shot of a boom operator.
Elsewhere, we hear Take Three being called out. Artistic construction is rendered visible, frustrating, riddled with bitter negotiations, staple heartbreaks that muddy the course of life and vice versa. Ekadesham isn’t the kind of film that invites performance-driven swings. The quartet of Mathew, Prabha, Baiju and Puthanchery make the aches, spite and faint hopes incredibly live-in.
Mahesh Narayanan, who directed Prabha in the incisive Ariyippu (2022), also surfaces in a couple of scenes with Alan, playing a director. When Alan, who works part-time as an Uber driver, needles him for casting possibilities in his next film, the director retains distance, curtly telling him to turn on the music in the car. In an earlier scene, Shreya too nudges Narayanan if she could assist him.
Ekadesham has no keenness for putting its cinema-obsessive characters in some halo. They can be cold, awfully stubborn and insecure. There’s sincere passion for the movies, allowing a complete surrender. Thankfully, Palathara also skewers these figures, their crippling oblivion. Sharath can be terribly self-absorbed. At one point, Nimisha muses, “Everyone exists just to be characters in his films”. She asks him directly if his film is more important to him than their relationship. He pours his life and experiences into his scripts. Palathara scans the price of such intimate wranglings. Ekadesham is biting, funny, sighing. Occasionally, it seems to get too wayward for its own good, but it’s so candidly soaked the arguments, miseries, grouses and disaffections pop brightly.
