Anomie

Dhanya and I watched Anomie after Mohiniattam. I wanted to watch the movie but Dhanya did not initially. The only reason we went ahead was because there was a Pirate Explains video of the film that we could fall back on in case we did not understand the movie.

We did not watch it continuously. But, over a few days.

At the heart of the film is Zara (Bhavana), whose brother’s disappearance — and the string of murders that follows people with a similar condition — and her reveal that they all died under similar conditions sets the plot in motion. Running parallel to the official police inquiry, her own search for answers plays out almost passively for most of the runtime. She asks around, follows leads that go nowhere, and seems, frankly, to be going through the motions rather than driving the case forward.

That’s exactly what makes the third-act reveal land so well. What reads as a half-hearted, meandering investigation turns out to be deliberately constructed that way. Once the reveal hits, you find yourself mentally rewinding through her scenes and realizing the film was quietly building toward this the whole time.

The bigger swing, though, is the film’s central sci-fi conceit. It is a sub-title, The Equation of Death. Rather than treating the afterlife as an abstraction or a metaphor, Anomie visualizes it. The production design and Sujith Sarang’s cinematography lean into color grading and imagery that make the afterlife sequences feel genuinely otherworldly. It almost feels like a space movie.

The Pirate Explains video tells a lot about where the science in Zara’s investigation gets wrong. He also puts in better words the sci-fi visualization in the movie. But, only watch it after you watch the movie.