In recent years, Malayalam cinema has been showered with praises even from its international peers for its engagement with socio-political issues apropos to marginalised communities. These movies probe questions that are both urgent and provocative in thought. Films like Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) and Sookshmadarshini (2024) have positioned themselves within this tradition, addressing domestic abuse, gender inequality and erasure of marginalized communities.
But the way these films tend to visualise resistance or retaliation is often misrepresented by aiming the camera only at the suffering or pain of the victim. These movies particularly exhibit personal resistance and self-defense as the only solutions to systemic violence. When cinema limits its lenses to isolated individual struggle, it risks absolving the larger machinery at work, it sequentially distracts the accountability from the systems they are meant to interrogate.
Resistance as a spectacle in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey
Vipin Das’ Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) takes the shape of a dark comedy, turning the survival of an abused wife into an act of individual resistance. The protagonist resorts to self-defense and learns to fight back against her abusive husband, and ultimately escapes the marriage. It’s a liberating narrative, but the concern lies in how it frames gendered violence as a problem that can be solved through strength and resilience solely from the victim.
By drawing self-defense within a comedic arc, the film risks desensitising domestic abuse, altering a deeply rooted societal issue into something that can be laughed off or solved with well-timed punches and kicks from the protagonist. The scene in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, when the protagonist first retaliates after days of secretly practicing self defence, the background is choreographed to the rhythm of an exaggerated cricket match commentary which frames her retaliation as a moment of victory. But victory for whom?
The degree of patriarchal ownership is further exposed but never confronted when the abusive husband is able to play the victim, easily convincing his relatives of his supposed suffering, and in the end, even his employees do not shy away from attacking the protagonist in his defense. This disparity is telling—a man who commits violence is shielded, excused, even avenged, while the woman, even after enduring abuse, remains discredited and alone. This indifference is not isolated to the immediate environment of the victim; rather the institutions serving to protect individuals have restricted access to all spaces or resources required for a woman to fight back. The film touches on this contradiction but also reduces a complex reality to a neatly packaged moment of victory.
The actual numbers displaying domestic violence in Kerala is far from these misrepresented cinematic victories, meanwhile Malayalam cinema rarely shows the courage to confront beyond the confines of individual narratives. The Kerala Police Crime Records reveal a horrifying 18887 cases of criminal offenses against women reported in the year of 2024. This represents only the number of women that withstood a catacomb of legal and societal indifferences, societal gaslighting, and institutional ignorance to a women’s plight. In truth, the official numbers barely scratch the surface of the lived reality.
Yet, on screen, resistance is conveniently diluted into scenes of cinematic delivery; a slap, a counterattack, an escape is the only solution to the immediate problem. The notion that an individual’s act of resistance can course correct a deeply embedded system instills hope but is unfortunately deceptive. These films, while powerful and creative in their deliverance, often sidestep the reality that for many women, fighting back is not even an option; it’s a risk that can even end in costing them their lives. What is ignorantly unspoken in these narratives is the urgent need for structural change, legal reform, and a fundamental shift in how society perceives domestic abuse—not as isolated acts of cruelty, but as symptoms of the reigning patriarchal system that continues to enable and facilitate them.
Sookshmadarshini and the silence around systemic violence upon queers
Sookshmadarshini (2024) is an intriguing film undoubtedly, set in rural Kerala, led by a female protagonist with a sharp, curious mind like Nancy Drew’s. There’s something undeniably attractive about the premise: a woman, clever and relentless, piecing together the truth in a place that resists it. But for all its intrigue, the film ultimately stops where it should push harder. It has cinematically visualised queer oppression as something inescapable, culminating in honor killing perpetuated and executed by the victim’s own family. The film acknowledges the coercion, violence, and elimination queer people face within families and society, but it abandons the necessity of indicting the institutions that enable these systematic violence.
The resolution in Sookshmadarshini leaves too much unsaid. Aditi Thyagarajan (Diana’s partner) is saved, but then what? Where is the legal battle? Where is the social outrage? The film, like so many before it, treats survival as the finish line as if making it out alive is the victory, rather than just the beginning of another fight. The mother’s decision to murder her own daughter in the name of family honor isn’t some unthinkable anomaly, it is a reality that plays out in homes across Kerala and beyond, where queerness is seen not as an identity, but as a threat. And yet, the film frames this act as a personal tragedy rather than what it really is: a symptom of a deeply entrenched system of control and erasure. The neighbors’ reactions reinforce this shock, perhaps, but no real confrontation of the violence at play. This is how it happens in real life too: families kill, communities look away, and justice is rarely served.
By the time the credits roll, there is no mention of prosecution, no courtroom, no consequences; a gaze out of a window, a lingering sadness, and an implicit acceptance that this is just how things are. But that’s the problem. What happens after survival? What about the legal and social structures that continue to fail queer people? Films like Sookshmadarshini point at oppression but do not put the effort in interrogating the mental position of the family, the collective othering from the society and the legalities that do not accommodate queer people.
The film’s use of queer tragedy isn’t about representation, it’s about glamorizing the script with shock value. Queerness is deployed as a narrative device, reducing its representation to a spectacle of suffering that strips queerness of its political and social gravity. This commercialisation of queer suffering shifts the focus from systemic violence to personal tragedy, making oppression seem like an individual misfortune rather than a structural issue.
Movies like Sancharram (2004) to Moothon (2019) beautifully tell queer stories that end in death, loss, or forced separation, as if queerness itself is synonymous with suffering. These Tragedy tropes often tend to bank on capitalizing human emotions to boost the impact on the audience, taking away the accountability from the systems to the individual’s unfortunate circumstances.
The Kerala High Court’s ruling in Adhila Nasarin vs. State Commissioner of Police & Ors. (2022) wasn’t just a legal win, it was a moment that underlined the right to self-determination for queer individuals in a society that often refuses to grant it. When Fathima, Adhila’s partner was allegedly abducted and tortured by her family for being in a same-sex relationship, the court’s intervention in reuniting the couple wasn’t framed as an extraordinary act of justice, but as a necessary correction to a system that still enables coercion in the name of family honor. But if a real-life story like Adhila’s and Fathima’s proves anything, it’s that there are battles being fought and won although they happen at minuscule rates.
When the system itself refuses to recognize same-sex relationships, gender diversity, or protections of marginalized communities,it cements the substrata even further, producing the thought that queerness is not just unrecognized but unthinkable. This legal complicity of the justice institutions against queer community triggers societal exclusion and othering, reinforcing the notion that queerness is a moral failing rather than an inherent identity. Despite historical and scientific evidence proving otherwise from ancient civilizations embracing same-sex relationships to over 1,500 animal species displaying homosexual behavior society, shaped by rigid heteronormativity, continues to frame it as unnatural.
This systemic denial extends into the personal sphere, where families, bound by tradition and social conditioning, view queerness as a threat to honor. Without legal validation, rejection escalates into coercion, conversion attempts, and, in extreme cases, honor killings. Sookshmadarshini exposes this harsh reality, portraying how a system’s silence enables violence. When the law refuses to protect queer lives, it leaves space for oppression to thrive under the guise of morality and family honor.
When films depoliticize systematic violence
Cinema is discussed and debated as a mirror reflection of society, but those arguments conveniently ignore its influential power to construct how people recognize and comprehend social issues. When systematic oppression is repackaged to either a spectacle of individual resilience or a tragedy vacant of adequate solution, it distorts how audiences participate in these realities beyond the screen. Presenting abuse and assault as something women can simply fight against shifts accountability away from the legal systems, cultural norms, and religious institutions that sustain these violence.
Structural violence gets commercialised when personal tragedy and survival or suffering are perceived as individual burden rather than a collective failure. And in the end, the illusion of resolution takes over the audience, believing they have “witnessed” something revolutionary, when in reality the structures enabling these violences remain uninvestigated and unaltered.
Malayalam cinema has to move past these tired narratives, it must stop picturing oppression as a personal misfortune and start interrogating the structures that make these hardships inevitable. Cinema should not just concentrate on the survivors but the legal and institutional barriers that deny the basic rights of marginalised communities to exist. They should expose how the state and media manipulate the observed oppression by displaying two dimensional narratives that enable and normalize it. And instead of endlessly recycling the lone survivor plot or tragic queer romance tropes, films must shift toward narratives of collective resistance, legal battles, and question erasure of queerness in the social structures.
The most frequent counter for this argument is “But it’s just a movie”, or “It’s just entertainment” and that brings us to the question, what is the true function of cinema? Is entertainment the only factor requisite for a good film? Cinema is more than just an instrument of entertainment, it is an influential piece of art with the power to structure public consciousness. Filmmakers must ask themselves, is cinema merely a tool to instill momentary gratification, or does it hold a responsibility and power to hold the system accountable? If films continue to capitalize on personal rebellion while ignoring the systemic forces that necessitate it, they risk becoming complicit in maintaining the status quo.
Cinema should not just be a medium for entertainment but a force capable of compelling audiences to see beyond individual pain and into the architecture of power and systematic violence itself.
Until then, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey and Sookshmadarshini will remain films that recognize suffering of marginalized communities but refuse to challenge the systems that create it; Necessary, but safe. Provocative, but only within limits. True progress in Cinema will come when the question shifts from how do individuals survive? to Why must they fight to survive at all?
