Churuli (2021) is Lijo Jose Pellissery’s most critically acclaimed film after his 2019 action thriller Jallikattu, which portrays man’s primordial affinity towards violence and animalistic nature. It is an adaptation of Vinay Thomas’ short story Kaligaminarile Kuttavalikal (Culprits of Kaligaminar), and it explores the lawless life of a fantastical land called Churuli, located in Kerala. Similar to Jallikattu, Churuli delves into the rawness of man’s uncivilised nature, and is filled with allegories. However, the film also miserably sidelines women and their stories, which is yet again a common criticism of Pellissery’s works.
Churuli (which translates to spiral), is a place where anything shall happen – murder, rape, child abuse – and there is no supreme law to question any of it. It is therefore also a place where you can do anything, where the reality of ‘you’ comes out, when detached from the civility of the real world. It leaves us to wonder, (like one of its characters say), “Is there anyone in this world who hasn’t committed a murder or a rape at least in his mind?”, then “Isn’t this the real paradise?”
The film begins with a traditionally animated prologue, which tells the folklore of a thirumeni, an upper-caste Hindu, who enters a forest to capture a phantom called madan. The cunning phantom, in the form of an anteater, pretends to be a ball, and after getting inside the thirumeni’s basket, guides him through the forest in a spiraling loop.
The present-day story of Churuli begins with a similar quest of two cops in disguise, Antony (played by Chemban Vinod) and Shajeevan (Vinay Fort), for a fugitive named Joy, (played with well-suited mysterious charm by Saubin Shahir). Vinay Fort does an excellent job in playing the different shades of Shajeevan, from an innocent, submissive, cop with no apparent bad habits in the initial phase, to a Shajeevan in his transitioning phase, when Churuli’s madness gets him, and he gradually becomes more confident, assertive, and even abusive.
The two cops take a jeep to Churuli, where the fugitive hides, and as they cross the log bridge that separates Churuli’s amoral world from the real world, they lose their power and control over everything. Antony and Shajeevan lead the conversation until they reach the bridge, and the moment they cross it and reach Churuli, the people’s expletive, charged language silences and subdues them. This continues throughout the film.
Churuli is a supernatural place, an ironical heaven-like purgatory. Sinned souls live here, and continue to sin more, both inflicting crime and suffering from crime. They are caught in an endless loop of pleasure gained from living an unprincipled life. Hareesh S’ screenplay and Madhu Neelakandan’s cinematography also suggest the existence of a matrix controlled by the aliens. Shots of spiders weaving webs, camera positionings that spy on the cops, flying lightballs, high- tech machinery out of space-time existence, Shajeevan’s evil smile, (later reflected in the people of Churuli), all signal to the existence of a supreme overlooker(s) who is/are more than human.
Another element of the movie which makes it interesting is how brilliantly it amalgamates folklore and sci-fi. The tale of madan and thirumeni is replaced by a narrative in which an alien force takes the place of the phantom. Also, in a scene in the film, Ittichen (played by Jaffar Idukki), interprets the light balls seen by Shajeevan as thee chamundi, a folk character that incarnates a Hindu goddess.
This combining of the new and the old then expands into an exhilarating journey towards the end of the film, when the folklore gets told again, and an astounding scene both cartoonish and sci-fi-like draws a curtain to the film, which to not ruin the pleasure of watching, and from the fact that it is almost impossible to describe it in words, I refrain from discussing in detail.
With its multiple narrative layers, surrealism, speculations, myth and mystery, Churuli is nothing less than a schizophrenic experience hard to let go of. Even after the film ends, we are left with pieces of a puzzle that grow into different shapes and keep us hooked to them in their never-ending loops. It seems, like the thirumeni, we are lost, and Pellissery with the cunningness of the phantom is still making our thoughts run in loops.