Kalamkaval Review | Jithin K Jose’s Debut Is Predictable, Yet Powers Through With Mammootty’s Performance

Divided into eight chapters, Kalamkaval, directed by Jithin K Jose, takes us on a journey with serial killer Stanley Das (Mammootty), who is chased by Inspector Jayakrishnan/Nath (Vinayakan). This one-line skeletal premise is not a spoiler, yet tells us everything we need to know about the film. For a thriller, Kalamkaval is predictable. The cinematic pauses that precede the ever-elusive cinematic cut tell us, if one pays close attention, exactly when and how Nath ascertains that the killer is Das. If one pays further attention, the ritualistic performance of goddess Bhadrakali, as she chases the demon Darika, rooted in the film’s title, prompts us toward the inevitable poetics of justice. In Jithin K Jose’s film, art, in the form of sketching, hides a sinisterness while ultimately becoming the conduit of a sense of justice.

There is something quiet and ordinary about Kalamkaval—a presentation of violence as indistinguishable from the everyday. Even amidst a figuration such as the serial killer, which often lends itself to grandeur, the film maintains restraint. It commands its form to submit to the topography of stylistic realism. Moving amidst restaurants, buses, cars, the footsteps of churches, temples, hotel rooms, public washrooms, among other places regularly frequented by people, Mammootty’s Stanley occupies public space with an uninhibited authority. Hiding in plain sight, he moves across the southern borderlands of Kerala and Tamil Nadu without hesitation or fear. 

Mammootty is the film’s strongest asset, embodying a murderer who kills for the sake of killing. He appears on the screen with such grace and resolve that his revamping of the ways of killing, from asphyxiating to poisoning, only reaffirms the elegance of his strategy and execution. The choice to poison—historically seen as a choice of murder weapon by women—adds a feminine flair to his performance. If masculinity and femininity are two sides of a coin, then Stanley exists on the edges of that coin; his heavy, dominant body towers on the margins of the screen, tenderly twinning with a devouring femininity that facilitates the rhythmic and cool procession of killing. The terrifying allure of Mammootty’s performance lies in creating the textures of a mind activating its murderous instincts without being loud, brazen, or creepy, as is customary in masculine formations of massacres. The dangerous spectatorial desire is to see him keep killing and become more misanthropic by the end of the film, without facing significant consequences. Yet, the film’s overall structure crushes any such illicit longings to elicit a practical climax of good triumphing over evil.

However, the absorption of femininity in the creation of Stanley (mainly because of the subtleties Mammootty extends to this character) makes it more glaring that women have little to do and be except appear as victims in Kalamkaval. In the face of such a lack and invisibility, this performance cannot be seen without a strong caveat, where a co-option of femininity necessitates a strange uneasiness. If the film makes it possible for such a queer and androgynous reading of its narrative and performance, it also simultaneously shuts it down by not allowing women—even in the capacity of being victims—to be three-dimensional. This flattening is further taxing, when women’s sexual desire and death are unilaterally combined to offer them up as the ideal ritual sacrifice.

Therefore, the statutory warning, violence against women is punishable by law, which appears in the beginning of the film, doesn’t seem merely like a socio-legal revision for men in the audience, but a twisted mode of address for women to not forget their positions as perennial victims of men.