Five years of Malayalam crime cinema that rewrote the Indian thriller rulebook

I watched Kannur Squad on a flight to Kochi last November. The man in the aisle seat — mid-forties, wearing a Mumbai Indians cap — leaned over during the interval and asked what I was watching. When I told him, he laughed. "Malayalam police film? Must be slow." Two hours later he asked me to write the title down. That interaction, more than any box office figure, tells you where the centre of gravity has moved.

The shift nobody in Mumbai noticed

Sometime between 2019 and 2024, Malayalam cinema stopped making "good regional films" and started making the most formally ambitious crime thrillers in the country. Not "for a Malayalam film" — full stop. The Mumbai trade papers still treat this as a curiosity, a pleasant anomaly. They're wrong. What we're looking at is a sustained, five-year recalibration of what an Indian thriller can do when it stops apologising for its own intelligence.

I'm not talking about the occasional breakout. Jallikattu (2019) went to the Oscars. Drishyam 2 (2021) got remade in three languages before the subtitles dried. But the depth of the bench — Purusha Pretham, Iratta, Rorschach, Aattam, Bramayugam, Bougainvillea — suggests something structural. A generation of writer-directors who grew up on world cinema but never stopped reading the local crime pages. They're not quoting Tarantino. They're quoting the Kozhikode sessions court.

2019-2021 — the pandemic accidentally helped

The lockdown gets too much credit. Yes, OTT bought Malayalam films that theatres wouldn't have risked screens on — C U Soon, shot entirely on phones during the first wave, sold to Amazon for a fraction of a mid-budget Hindi film's marketing spend. But the films themselves? They were already written. Mahesh Narayanan didn't invent the tech-thriller grammar of C U Soon in April 2020; he'd been refining it since Take Off (2017). The pandemic just forced the distribution hand.

What changed was the audience's tolerance for complexity. Stuck at home, people watched Drishyam 2 and realised a sequel could be smarter than the original. They watched Malik and sat through a three-hour gangster epic that refuses a single "mass" moment — no slow-mo walk, no background score swell when the hero enters. Fahadh Faasil's Sulaiman just… exists. Ages. Makes mistakes. Loses. I remember pausing Malik halfway through to message a friend: "This is what Gangs of Wasseypur wanted to be but couldn't sustain." He replied three days later: "You're right and I hate you for making me think about it."

The police procedural gets a spine transplant

Hindi cinema's police film has two modes: Singham (muscles, morality, moustache) or Article 15 (earnest liberal guilt). Malayalam found a third: the bureaucrat with a case file. Kannur Squad (2023) opens not with a chase but with ASI George Martin (Mammootty) arguing jurisdiction with a Karnataka inspector over a stolen laptop. The first forty minutes are procedure — warrants, translators, inter-state protocol, the sheer grinding boredom of tracking a suspect across state lines. When the action finally arrives, it feels earned. Violent. Consequential.

Iratta (2023) goes further. Joju George plays twin brothers — both cops, one functional, one drowning. The film isn't about the case; it's about what the job does to a marriage, a sibling bond, a man's memory of his own father. The climax — a single take in a police station corridor, no music, just the sound of a typewriter and a man breaking — stayed with me longer than any encounter scene in a ₹200 crore Hindi tentpole. Purusha Pretham (2023) pushes the procedural into absurdism: a dead body that won't stay identified, a constable who talks to the corpse, a system that runs on chai and clerical error. It's Kafka in khaki.

When the gangster film grows up

Bheeshma Parvam (2022) looks like a mass entertainer on the poster — Mammootty in a white mundu, sunglasses, surrounded by henchmen. Amal Neerad directs it like a Western. The violence is sudden, ugly, over in seconds. Michael (Mammootty) doesn't give speeches; he gives orders. The film's central tension isn't "will he win" but "what's left of him when he does." I saw it in a packed theatre in Thrissur. The whistles came at the interval. By the climax, the hall was silent. That silence is the achievement.

Malik did this at larger scale. Rorschach (2022) took the revenge thriller and asked: what if the avenger is unreliable? Mammootty again — different register, same refusal to perform "star moments." The film's structure fractures alongside his memory. By the end you're not sure what happened, only what he believes happened. That ambiguity used to be art-house territory. Here it's mainstream Malayalam cinema trusting its audience to keep up.

The chamber piece as thriller

Aattam (2023) — "The Play" — takes place almost entirely in a rehearsal space. A theatre troupe debates whether to expel a member accused of sexual harassment. No flashbacks, no police station, no courtroom. Just twelve actors in a circle, and the camera circling them. Anand Ekarshi directs it like a pressure cooker. Every silence is charged. The verdict isn't the point; the erosion of certainty is. I watched it with my sister, a corporate lawyer. She said: "This is more accurate about how power works than any courtroom drama I've seen." She's right. The law happens in the room before it reaches the court.

Drishyam 2 (2021) operates in a similar register. The first film was a masterclass in misdirection; the sequel is a masterclass in consequence. Georgekutty (Mohanlal) didn't just get away with it — he's been living inside the lie for six years. The film tracks the psychological toll, not the plot mechanics. The climax — a confession that isn't, a victory that feels like defeat — rewrites the rules of the franchise thriller. I was about to call it the best Indian sequel ever, then I remembered U Turn (2016) and had to sit with that comparison for a week.

Folk horror meets modern anxiety

Bramayugam (2024) and Manjummel Boys (2024) look nothing alike on paper. One is a black-and-white period folk horror set in a 17th-century mana; the other a based-on-fact survival thriller in the Guna Caves. But both use genre to ask the same question: what happens when the stories we tell ourselves about safety collapse? Bramayugam's Kodumon Potti (Mammootty, again — the man is having a decade) is a feudal lord who maintains power through ritual and fear. The horror isn't supernatural; it's structural. The camera lingers on palm-leaf manuscripts, oil lamps, the geometry of oppression. Rahul Sadasivan shoots it like a nightmare recorded on damaged film stock.

Manjummel Boys takes a real 2006 incident — friends on a trip, one falls into a cave, the rescue — and strips away every survival-movie cliché. No heroic speeches. No swelling score. Just panic, bad decisions, and the specific terror of watching someone you love disappear into darkness. The cave sequences are shot in actual darkness. You hear more than you see. My palms were sweating in a way no Hindi survival film has managed since Trapped (2016). The difference: Trapped was about one man. Manjummel Boys is about a group, and how groups fail each other.

What's deliberately not on this list (and why)

I left out Trance (2020). Anwar Rasheed's ambition is visible in every frame — Fahadh Faasil as a motivational-speaker-turned-godman, the satire of faith-as-commerce, the visual language that shifts with the protagonist's mental state. But the third act collapses into the very spectacle it critiques. I left out Jallikattu (2019) because it's not a crime thriller — it's a chase film that becomes a metaphor, and the metaphor is the point. I left out Bougainvillea (2024) — Amal Neerad's latest, Fahadh and Kunchacko Boban in a psychological spiral — because I haven't rewatched it yet. First viewing left me admiring the craft but unsure of the politics. A critic's job is to sit with that uncertainty, not pretend it resolved.

I also left out the Hindi remakes. Drishyam 2 (Hindi, 2022) is competent. But it's a Xerox of a film that worked because of its specific cultural texture — the Kerala Christian household, the cable TV repair shop, the particular weight of a father's lie in that community. Removing the texture leaves the plot mechanics, and plot mechanics are the least interesting thing about Drishyam 2.

Where to start if you're new to this

Don't start with the biggest names. Start with Purusha Pretham. It's ninety minutes, weird, funny, and it announces the grammar immediately: the police station as ecosystem, the corpse as character, the bureaucracy as horror. Then Kannur Squad for the procedural at scale. Then Aattam for the chamber piece. Then Bramayugam for the period horror. Then Malik if you have three hours and want to see what a gangster epic looks like when it refuses to mythologise. Save Drishyam 2 for last — it helps to have seen the first, but the sequel stands alone as a study of a man hollowing himself out.

The common thread isn't a director or a star. It's a conviction: the thriller doesn't need to be dumbed down to travel. These films travel anyway — subtitles, word of mouth, the quiet recommendation from a stranger on a flight. The Mumbai trade papers will catch up. They always do. By then, the next five films are already in post-production.

Write to me at [email protected] if you disagree with the omissions. I keep a folder.