Maheshinte Prathikaram, Mahesh’s Revenge (2016)

“When I was shooting for Idukki Gold, Syam Puskaran, the writer of the film, and I got talking one night. He told me about Thampan Purushan, a man from Puskaran’s town, who was once hit during a brawl. Purushan took an oath that until he hit the guy who thrashed him, he would not wear slippers. But the poor man had to wait a number of years because his opponent had gone off to the Gulf to resume his job. I thought this was a story worth shooting as an exercise or a short film. A few hours into the night, we then got talking about other such characters and situations we knew – a photographer in my town, scenes I remembered from a funeral once, some of our love stories. By the end of the night, we had decided that we had to make a full-fledged film out of all of it.” 

-- Dileesh Pothan interview: ‘If Maheshinte Prathikaram had flopped, I would have quit filmmaking’

Akam (2011), a psychological thriller, is an adaptation of Malayalam litterateur Malayatoor Ramakrishnan’s seminal 1969 novel Yakshi, which, though rooted in Malayali culture, explores the universal penchant for demonising female sexuality. According to myth, the Yakshi is a female demon, who, in the guise of a beautiful woman, seduces men and drinks their blood.  Akam unfolds through the story of Srinivas (Fahad), a troubled young architect, and his wife, the beautiful and enigmatic Ragini (Anumol), who he married on a whim. Soon Srinivas’ insecurities come to the fore and he begins to suspect that she is a Yakshi. “Srini can’t relate to Ragini on many levels. In any relationship power keeps shifting. When there is a communication breakdown the situation becomes amplified. At first that’s the charm but later on it becomes a source of his frustration and consequently, fearing a threat to his very existence, he begins to demonise her,” explains Shalini Usha Nair. 

– NITA SATHYENDRAN, “Inside the female psyche”