Dies Irae is a Malayalam horror film starring Pranav Mohanlal.
It is directed by Rahul Sadasivan and had a theatrical release on October 31.
It is a smartly-made horror film with an interesting turn of events in its climactic twist.
Dies Irae, directed by Rahul Sadasivan, is a fun horror film. Rohan, (Pranav Mohanlal) is an architect who lives alone in a duplex bungalow. When we first see him, he is making out with a girl who picks up her boyfriend’s call in the middle of kissing Rohan and tells him if it’s not urgent she’ll speak to him later. All this to establish that Rohan is a cool dude. He then goes down to his party where he high-fives several people, pours himself whiskey at a table where another cool dude is talking about attracting the life we want through affirmations. He then speaks to a friend who tells him that Kani, their classmate—someone Rohan once had a brief affair with—has died by suicide.
Rohan wakes up pensive the next morning and looks at a few pictures of himself and Kani together and several of her messages he hasn’t replied to. Later, when he visits the wake at Kani’s house, he picks up an orange-colour hair clip from her dressing table and brings it home to perhaps have something to remember her by—something he shouldn’t have done.
Built by his father, Rohan’s home is, for all practical purposes, a modern home in that it comes with a staircase, lift, modular kitchen, and a large balcony. Beautiful homes haunted by funny, scary, well meaning, torturing—all variety of ghosts is the stuff of pleasant horror cinema. Like most haunted but beautiful homes, this one too is largely peopled by the housekeeping staff and security guard during the day and ghosted at night.
One smart thing the film does is take the pointless anklet sound trope in horror and give it somewhat of a back story. Kani used to be a classical dancer. So the sound of anklets at night in Rohan’s house isn’t just the sound of a random ghost who has watched some north Indian horror. It could be Kani. Like Rohan himself woefully admits to Madhusudhanan Potti (Gibin Gopinath, Kani’s neighbour), at some point in the film, one would suspect that Kani is ghosting Rohan because he too once ghosted her.
But that is not all. Before the interval, we see that there is a twist to the haunting, which leaves Rohan scared but more confused. We go back to the orange hair clip Rohan picked up.
In the mid 20th century, which is when the tic tac hair clip or the snap hair clip hit the market, the lives of many a people with messy hair became easy. Patented to an Edward F. Zore in 1957, the hair clip is a marvel. It is easy to carry, wear, and remove. But its best feature is its sound: the classic tik-tik gives hands something to do, which is what poor Rohan must’ve thought too. The film takes the single most significant curiosity of human hands—wanting something to do—and builds an entire horror plot out of it.
Back in Kani’s room, Madhu and Rohan discover that Kani’s anklets are missing after which, through several hoops, we land at a supreme reverse ‘Psycho’ moment in the film, played much like a reverse uno moment. If the pen is mightier than the sword, comrades, then please know that sometimes decayed dead bodies are scarier than their ghosts.
Vijetha teaches Communicative English at St Joseph’s University, Bengaluru and writes at rumlolarum.com.
