Rorschach movie review: Revenge redefined with Mammootty v Grace Antony v Bindhu Panicker leading the charge

Language: Malayalam

Cast: Mammootty, Grace Antony, Bindhu Panicker, Jagadish, Sanju Sivram, Kottayam Nazeer, Sharafudheen, Ira Noor, Cameo: Asif Ali

Director: Nisam Basheer

Star rating: 3.5/5

There’s something not quite right about Luke Antony ( Mammootty). In the opening chapter of Rorschach, when this wealthy NRI walks into a rural police station to report his wife Sofiya’s disappearance, the situation smells dubious. Not surprisingly, Luke’s claim that they were in a car accident and she was gone by the time he regained consciousness, does not sit well with at least one perceptive observer, the policeman Ashraf (Jagadish).

When Luke refuses to leave the place till Sofiya is found, speculation about his intentions runs rife among the villagers. His indefatigable quest for his missing spouse turns out to be nothing that anyone could have predicted – not Ashraf, not the local factory owner Sujatha ( Grace Antony), nor her mother-in-law Seetha (Bindhu Panicker). Rorschach – written by Sameer Abdul and directed by Nisam Basheer – is unpredictable in more ways than anyone could guess.

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The spark for the events in this film is an individual who destroys another’s happiness, but does not live to suffer a vendetta. How do you punish the dead? Rorschach redefines revenge and challenges our definition of life itself as it tells a tale of excruciating loss and an iron will deployed to satisfy an unprecedented, seething desire for payback.

Rorschach takes its name from the Rorschach Test that – to explain it with a layperson’s understanding – assesses a subject’s psychology based on their perceptions of visual patterns created by inkblots. The title refers as much to Luke’s tortured and possibly broken mind as to his notions of living, dying and when exactly a human being is truly finished, and our own perception of who is who, who is dead and who alive by the end of this saga.

Though Rorschach is eerie and evokes curiosity from the beginning, I took a while to get fully immersed in it, partly because I was torn between finding the pace tedious and intriguing, partly because the music and sound design sometimes get overbearing, and partly because the use of English for the song accompanying the narrative is a misfit in this rustic Kerala setting. There is a tendency in a certain kind of Malayalam cinema to feature English and Hindi where they are out of place, thus detracting from a film’s rootedness. The awe in which some Malayalam filmmakers hold these two languages is one undesirable extreme of a spectrum at the other extreme of which is the Hindi supremacism that enables most Hindi filmmakers to ignore India’s language diversity in all locations, including when they set their plots outside the Hindi belt. Thankfully, Rorschach’s lyricist does better than the writers of the cringeworthy English lines sung in the likes of _12th Man_ and _Love Action Drama_, and the tunes, their occasional unnecessary volume notwithstanding, match the mood of the film.

Besides, Rorschach is as unrelenting as Luke, and is designed to chip away at a viewer’s skepticism bit by bit until she succumbs to its lure. I can pinpoint the moment when my antennae shot up and I got hooked. It came about 40 minutes into the 150 minutes running time when I realised that what seemed like a sound artificially stuffed into the film’s audioscape was in fact an actual memory from Luke’s past. This revelation comes in a flashback slipped so seamlessly into the narrative that it made me sit up.

Rorschach swoops from the past to the present, into Luke’s imagination and out into the real world, with a smoothness that does the screenplay proud and should put Kiran Das in contention for several Best Editing trophies when the next awards season rolls around. Equally laudable is Nimish Ravi’s cinematography capturing the interiors of gloomy homes, troubled faces, the giant mountains and lonely forests where Rorschach roams, and the production design team’s construction of an intimidatingly spacious, half-built home.

There are few joys in life as great as the joy of watching Mammootty submit himself fully to a script. The star who risked his macho reputation by playing a hesitant policeman in Khalidh Rahman’s _Unda_ (2019) and starred as a despicable casteist bigot in Ratheena P.T’s _Puzhu_ earlier this year, here takes up a grey character. Mammukka’s weakness for the past couple of decades has been an unwillingness to acknowledge his real-life age on screen. In Rorschach though, both camera and makeup are employed to let fatigue show on his skin and gracefully portray Luke as an elderly man – not the 71 that Mammootty is in real life, but certainly much older than the pretending-to-be-young boyfriend of young women that he has been in many of his low-brow commercial films. Mammukka lets tiredness seep into every line of Luke’s frame, while his eyes are by turns vacant, weary, sorrowful, determined and burning with anger.

Predictably though, an artiste who looks young enough to be his (grand)daughter acts as Sofiya. I have a dream, that one day, the director of a Mammootty starrer will recognise the ageism that leads to the casting of only 20/30-somethings as his sister, lover and wife, will abjure the patriarchal, damaging view that women of Mammootty’s age are unworthy of these roles, and will put her/his foot down on seeing the absurdity in the resultant pairings. I have a dream…

As it happens, the snatches of conversations between Sofiya and Luke are the only ordinarily written dialogues in Rorschach.

That apart, it is a measure of Mammootty’s respect for the writing and the director of Rorschach that, despite being the megastar of this project and its producer, he does not monopolise screen time here. Every member of the cast is outstanding, and half a dozen are given plenty of space with Mammootty nowhere in the frame. In fact, though Rorschach is Mammukka’s film, it belongs too to the formidable performances by Grace Antony as a gritty woman trying to figure Luke out and Bindhu Panicker as a mother who will go to any lengths to preserve her family’s social standing. The film is nothing without their Sujatha and Seetha, both roles written with a keen eye for detail.

The treatment of women in Rorschach is a vast improvement on Nisam’s earlier directorial work, _Kettiyollaanu Ente Maalakha_ (2019). That film was a milestone in the sense that it recognised the existence of marital rape and clearly described it as a crime, which is rare not just in Indian cinema but in the overall public discourse, but it messed up by giving the man’s journey primacy over the woman in a storyline that called for both to be given equal room.

Malayalam cinema has already given us a couple of solid revenge dramas in 2022, _Puzhu_ and _Innale Vare_. Rorschach is different from them in the way it resists genre boundaries with its paranormal elements and existential questions in a psychological thriller. This film teases the brain from the moment Luke enters that police station. It is not scary in a conventional way, yet presents a terrifying vision of the depths of a vengeful, probably fractured psyche. The director is so confident of the written material he’s working with, that he does not speed up matters at any point to heighten the excitement. Instead he moulds Rorschach into a slow burn that initially tested my patience but paid incremental dividends as each minute went by.

Early in Rorschach when a search party walks across a rocky river bed, Nimish Ravi’s camera pulls out, rising higher and higher until those human beings are no longer visible. The image mirrors the theme of the film: if I can’t see you, does that mean you do not exist? Conversely, like the human faces we imagine when we look up at the moon, the people we spot staring at us from mosaic tiles or the figures we perceive in ink stains, just because I see you, does it mean you do exist? These questions linger long after the credits roll away, much like Rorschach itself, which is not playing on a screen before me as I write this but is still playing in my head.

Rating: 3.5 (out of 5 stars) 

This review was first published when Rorschach was released in theatres. The film is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar.

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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