Paka (River of Blood) movie review: Of dead bodies, deader emotions and a mesmerising vortex of vendetta

Language: Malayalam

A woman’s quavering voice can be heard reciting the Hail Mary, that globally familiar prayer to the mother of Jesus. As the camera enters her room along with her grandson, she effortlessly shifts gears from worship and addresses the boy, goading him to kill their enemies. We don’t see her face, but on the wall beside her bed is a cross, the ultimate symbol of Jesus who was barbarically executed by crucifixion 2,000 years ago. The very same Jesus who said: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you…” The irony is clearly lost on the old lady.

This is writer-director Nithin Lukose’s Paka (River of Blood), in which religion is omnipresent and its followers oblivious to the teachings of their faith.

It is interesting how context can so greatly change the meaning of a film. Here in north India, where the Christian minority is almost invisible in the public realm, where the community was more or less erased from Hindi cinema a couple of decades back – and stereotyped relentlessly up to the 1990s – such Christian imagery in a film would amount to demonising a tiny marginalised minority already under political attack. In Malayalam cinema though, in which both Muslims and Christians are widely represented, coming as it does from the southern state of Kerala where both communities are comparatively well-off, high-profile and influential, it is possible to see that Christians are not being singled out for condemnation or stereotyping in Paka. The film is, as we are told by text on screen, “inspired by stories heard from my (the filmmaker’s) grandmother”; the characters, hence, happen to be from the community. Paka’s use of religion, therefore, can be interpreted as being both specific to Christianity and symbolic of all major world religions, in particular the disconnect often seen between their teachings versus the actions of their adherents.

Paka is a tale of inter-generational violence and a vortex of vendetta beyond anyone’s control. We are informed at the start that it is rooted in migrations that occurred from Central Kerala to Wayanad from the 1940s to the 1970s and feuds that have lasted ever since.

In the present day, conflict has taken countless lives from the families of Johnny (Basil Paulose) and Anna ( Vinitha Koshy ) who reside in rural settlements beside a deceptively placid river. Their people – hers more moneyed than his – have been at each other’s throats for so long that the youngest generation, which continues to engage in this battle, has no idea how it all began.

Each time a murder is committed, a body is thrown into the river. Such deaths are so frequent here, that one man has even been identified as a specialist in fishing corpses out of the deep. Johnny and Anna are in love and hope their marital union will bring an end to this bloodshed. As it is, the area has seen a lull in the butchery since the arrest several years back of Johnny’s uncle Kochepu (Jose Kizhakkan) at whose hands Anna lost her father. How affection and positivity blossomed between them in this depressing scenario is left to our imagination. The couple’s plans are disrupted when Kochepu’s prison sentence ends unexpectedly and his return sets off a chain of events that threaten to destroy everything in its wake.

Hostility spanning generations standing in the way of young lovers has been a popular theme with writers for centuries, most famously depicted in William Shakespeare ’s Romeo and Juliet . In that sense, Paka is not novel. The film is less about the lovers though and more about the self-defeating nature of revenge – it ruins everyone involved including the one exacting it and many who oppose it.

Paka is the Malayalam word for revenge. The film was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2021, and is produced by Raj R. (Mallesham / Telugu) and Anurag Kashyap ( Black Friday , Gangs of Wasseypur / Hindi). Unending spirals of savagery and their ultimate pointlessness have been Kashyap’s preoccupation throughout his career, most dramatically so in Gangs 1&2 with which he earned international recognition. It is not surprising then that he was drawn to Paka.

This film is distinct though from Gangs and other thematically similar films. For one, despite the spate of murders during its running time, Paka rarely splashes blood across the screen, most of the killings are shown either from a distance or happen outside the camera’s line of vision. Paka is also astonishingly quiet. So quiet that its calm demeanour is terrifying.

The stillness of the river mirrors the almost serene tone that Nithin Lukose, already an accomplished sound designer, adopts for his narrative. An excellent sound team (Pramod Thomas, Jobin Jayan, Aravind Sundar) facilitates his vision for Paka, along with Faizal Ahamed’s introspective music. Together they create one of the film’s most outstanding elements: its minimalist audioscape in which a blacksmith’s hammering merges with a percussion instrument, noise is a rare intrusion, the steady hum of daily life dominates, and the seemingly tranquil atmosphere serves to intensify the fear that hangs over Johnny, Anna and even the openly aggressive members of their families.

Cinematographer Srikanth Kabothu captures the beautiful brooding river, its terrible secrets and the wealth of greenery around with cool detachment, never going so close as to be intrusive or gratuitously bloody. Photographs on the walls of homes in Paka are not just memorials of deceased relatives, they are also tally bars accounting for murders.

The exclusion of one crucial visual from the film is hard to accept though: the grandmother’s face is not shown at any point while she lies ranting in bed, instigating her family to continue the carnage that has already consumed so many in their midst. Irrespective of what the profound intent may have been, the fact is that this decision comes across as a gimmick and unwittingly serves to underline the marginalisation of the women’s point of view in Paka.

Anna is important but is never explored with the depth given to Johnny and his brother Paachi (Athul John). The only other woman with agency in the film is the grandmother. Her counterpart in Anna’s family is the vengeance-seeking, sightless grandfather who we get to both see and hear. This difference in treatment is especially exasperating because all the other women in Paka are passive victims and observers of the goings-on between the two families. No doubt their passivity and helplessness are in themselves telling comments on patriarchy, as were the countless women that the male protagonists pass or interact with briefly on their journey in last year’s Koozhangal (Pebbles / Tamil) that became India’s entry for the Oscars, but too many Indian filmmakers indict patriarchy by giving centrality to men in their stories, and seem not to see the contradiction in doing so.

With the best-written role in Paka, Basil Paulose is brilliant playing a man who is desperate to bridge the chasm running between Anna’s and his families, never more so than when his face, his body and his whole being seem to crumple and fold in that moment when he realises that his fate as a participant in the bloodletting is sealed. The entire cast is spot on although the director has told the media that some are non-professionals drawn from the local community. Vinitha Koshy is lovely as Anna despite the limited writing offered to her. Watch her as the camera watches her almost shielding herself from Kochepu and the anguish he has caused her.

While recounting this saga of unceasing hatred laced with a sliver of hope, Paka also showcases vignettes of daily life in this picturesque mountain region, most prominently the church festival, a regular motif in Malayalam cinema. The feast is not as extravagantly mounted as the one in the finale of last year’s Minnal Murali , nor as sensationally shot as in Angamaly Diaries , yet is as impressive as it chooses to be in keeping with the consistently low-key tenor of the film.

Nithin Lukose makes his directorial debut with Paka. The film has conjured up a horrifying universe in which an old man realises at last that the flames he fuelled all his life cannot be reined in by any master, least of all himself; and the birth of a baby could spell hope or mark the arrival of yet another generation to be recruited into an interminable war.

Paka (River of Blood) is a timely, chilling reminder of what “an eye for an eye” can do to this world.

Rating: 3.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Paka is streaming on SonyLIV

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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