Mammootty’s Kaathal The Core is the tender heartache that our cinema needs today, Contrasting portrayal of hyper masculine angst in current times

Kaathal: the core feature of Mammootty and Jyothika is a palate refresher in the current state of the cinema that our country is watching. In this film of Jeo Baby ‘The Filmmaker’, no one gets angry; they are lonely, ashamed, trapped, and even annoyed but never angry. Anger as an emotion that has been dominating Blockbusters of last year. In Mammootty’s newly released Malayalam drama, people look out for each other, and the family stays together, even when the patriarch struggles to come to light.

The enormously heart-touching movie is currently being streamed on Prime Video. The film calls for sensitivity as it portrays the complications of coming out. The movie proceeds in a very optimistic manner as it follows a marriage that is falling apart. Still, it remains hopeful that no matter what a heart can continue to love even when it is nursing a broken heart. Featuring possibly one of the most effective performances of last year, Mammootty plays Mathew Devassy as a man who must rescue himself from the trap that his loved ones and community set up for him. Questioning us-  How do you break free, without breaking apart?

There is a lot that has been written about Kaathal’s extraordinary portrayal of same-sex love and its ruining impact on people who never find acceptance, but beyond its evident chief theme, the film is a glorious palate refresher in the current state of the cinema our country is watching. All the top-grossing films of 2023 were action films that, in some ways, were fueled by a  precise narrative dread.

A dissatisfied soldier fights against his own country, a duo of father and son unites to take revenge and another goes to the neighboring country to get his son back, while a son in another film destroys himself–and the world around him–to win the love of his father. The films are all different in their tone, scale, and politics, powered through with anger and violence. But Kaathal exceptionally examines how people, even when pushed to the extreme ends, might continue to dream of a gentler and more accepting world. Unlike Blockbusters of the country in the current times, the movie is a unique blend of love and hope. They don’t slash and slay, they just hug, cry, and whisper a sorry whenever they are required to.

In one segment, when Mammootty goes to see his daughter in her school, covering up the truth of his identity that has become the talk of the village, the daughter asks him to stop. “I am not mad at you,” she says. “I didn’t speak to you not because I was angry, but because I was sad.” In another segment, after his life and choices are almost on the verge of coming out in a court full of people, Mammootty encounters a volunteer of an LGBTQIA association. He is tensed, processing the fact that he openly denied being a homosexual, when the volunteer recommends that they offer him counseling and mental health support considering coming out isn’t easy. In that brief moment, it feels Kaathal’s Mathew would lose his temper, and shoot back at the unsolicited advice.

But he does the most unimaginable thing, he opens the door of his car and sits back, broken and contemplating his life rolling up the windows. In this film, the violence–isn’t in blood and slaughter, but the crushing realisation that the one who is suffering is almost always lonely. Again, the question is should it be?

Kaathal is a masterclass in romance and heartbreak, as it almost entirely plays out through the eyes of its sufferers. It frames scene after scene of stolen glances between former lovers, the scrutiny of guilt from a community, and the scanning of the curious. The lovers here deal with gigantic heartaches. Sometimes, they try to drown the sorrow at a bar with a friend who no longer finds it comfortable to be around them, or in silence, as the guilt is best kept in check. Surprisingly they don’t burn the world down in the name of love, they instead attempt to knit it together with the love that was promised but never given.

Jeo Baby’s Kaathal is a milestone and there was no better time for its release than now. It curtails the rhetoric and dread and gently tries to bend our perspectives in the direction of love at times of violence. Contrasting the Blockbusters it isn’t asking lovers to lick the shoe instead, it is calling for tenderly and gently healing the wounds.