The Malayalam movie, not the dance form. Spoilers ahead!
Instagram and YouTube shorts manipulated me into wanting to watch this movie. It came frequently enough and I was interested enough to watch it.
I watched it with my wife who was watching it for the second time. The first time she watched both the movies was after a fight we had.
Bharatnatyam is part one of this duology. It didn’t do well in the theaters and did wonderfully well on OTT. S R Praveen had written about this phenomenon (paywalled) for The Hindu. That encouraged the film makers to make a part two.
Both the movies have a lot of inside jokes and nods to other Malaylam movies.
The first film centers on Bharathan Nair, a strict patriarch played by Sai Kumar, and his son Sashi (Saiju Kurup), who discovers — after his father’s paralytic stroke — that Bharathan has been secretly running a second family in northern Kerala for years. What could have been a heavy melodrama is instead handled with a light, situational comic touch, and that’s exactly what worked for me.
The sequel picks up after Bharathan Nair’s death, as Sashi and his family travel to meet Rukmini and Ajay at their new home. What starts as a family reunion spirals into something far more unsettling: the revelation that a local temple — and the deity people have been devoutly worshipping — was fabricated by Bharathan Nair himself, seemingly as a means of siphoning public donations.
After watching these two movies, I would suggest that you watch The Pirate Explains video that help you catch things you may not have caught in the first viewing and also the various Malayalam movies that these movies has references to.
What makes watching these two films together so rewarding is the contrast. The first is about a private family secret and asks what you owe the people closest to you when the truth comes out. The second scales that same premise up to a public, communal level — asking what a lie can do when it’s not just kept inside a family, but sold to an entire town as sacred truth. One is about protecting people you love from an uncomfortable truth; the other is about what happens when that same instinct curdles into exploiting people’s faith for money, and then killing to keep it buried.