Bramayugam Review: Allegorical Horror At Its Best In This Eerie Commentary About Power Struggle
Director: Rahul Sadasivan
Writers: TD Ramakrishnan, Rahul Sadasivan
Cast: Mammootty, Arjun Ashokan, Sidharth Bharathan, Amalda Liz, Insane Ashraf
Duration: 139 mins
Available in: Theatres
A game of dice is at the core of Rahul Sadasivan’s Bramayugam. It’s being played between the powerful Kodumon Potti (Mammootty) and his houseguest, a helpless wandering singer (Arjun Ashokan). But unlike a game of chance that takes place between equals, here, the toss up is between one who has everything and the other who has nothing. If the singer wins, Potti promises to let him go so he can return home to his mother. And if the singer loses, he has to pledge the only commodity of value he can offer—his time.
We too invariably enter into this agreement as we witness this game of dice. Trapped within the labyrinthine walls of this manor, we do not so much as a get a glance of the world outside once we enter and we often catch ourselves in the exact predicament as that of its protagonist. The film’s pacing reflects the mindset of the people living here. Stuck in a timeless loop where the nights feel longer than days, the hope of escape is the only factor keeping them alive.
In the cook (Siddharth Bharathan), the singer finds a partner to trauma-bond with. The cook seems to have been trapped in the same loop as the singer and they are successors to dozens of servants who lived and died in the service of the Potti. Given the sorcerer-like powers of the Potti, the singer’s entry into the manor isn’t as accidental as we might have felt. It might seem easy to enter but impossible to leave.
Part of this is because of the way Potti welcomes the singer into his house. He seems to be above notions of caste or creed when he allows the singer a plate full of food, also allowing him the “freedom” to be seated on the same level as him. It’s almost as though Potti lures his subjects with a false sense of equality and then goes on to trap them with his trickery. In Potti’s words, the age that they’re living in is beyond the forces of karma. They seem to exist in Bramayugam, an aberration within the Kaliyugam in which God remains absent.
It is in this context that we can look at Bramayugam as an allegory on power and how it can corrupt absolutely. The three central characters of the film feel like three classes that are constantly at loggerheads with each other. At once, we feel the two at the bottom of this tower can fight together against the power that be, but eventually, Bramayugam takes a cynical view in which it is just a matter of time before power takes over and corrupts everyone. And if the ending is anything to go by, it’s the beginning of several cycles of class struggle with only the masters changing over time.
Rahul Sadasivan builds this allegory in an eerie universe that’s as disturbing as it is hypnotic. It never stops raining in this mansion once a curse has been planted and you subconsciously feel the inescapable dampness of the place. Like the singer, you too begin to wish for a second of silence, away from the constant sound of rain falling through the gaps of the dilapidated structure. The columns of the house create the illusion of a hundred monsters starring down at its captor and the decadence of the period is illustrated by generations of decay it has undergone. Certain shots (the DOP is Shehnad Jalal) set in the building’s granary with mounds of rice on each side, remind the viewer of the iconic frame from Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
Of course a large reason why we feel trapped along with the other captors is the mighty presence of Mammootty. You feel this presence even in scenes he’s not a part of and you catch yourself asking characters to remain silent lest they were to be caught by Potti. It’s also surprising how we do not even see glimpses of his characters from films like Vidheyan or Paleri Manikyam, despite how hard we might try to find similarities. But along with Arjun Ashokan, the film belongs to Siddharth Bharathan whose face pours out decades of sadness for having to serve a monster for so long that he’s become numb to the oppression.
But with his second straight movie within the horror genre, Rahul Sadasivan stamps his standing as someone with extreme control over the medium, choosing to make a complex movie rather than one with easy thrills or jump scares. If Bhoothakaalam looked inward into the ghosts that reside within the three generations of a nuclear family, in Bramayugam he makes larger points about society and ghosts that haunt us all and to this day. This time around, he returns with a fine allegorical horror movie where the ghosts continue to haunt, long after you’ve left the haunted house.