A scene from ‘Perumani’

Some devious minds enjoy fabricating lies and pitting people against each other so that they can profit from the conflict that follows. Like the real world, the fictional village Perumani – from the film of the same name – also has some such people. The lie they concoct, and secretly post on the village noticeboard in the dead of night, concerns the marriage between local rich man Nazar (Vinay Forte) and Fatima (Deepa Thomas).

Filmmaker KB Maju’s third film perumaniWhat begins with a charmingly animated folk tale about a curse that struck a village ages ago, begins with this lie put up on a notice board and almost every event of the film is neatly tied around it. One of the things that works for this is that he never deviates from the wacky tone he sets in these opening minutes, even when the situation becomes dire in the script. Still, it works in harmony, never coming across as a discordant note. In achieving this, he comes across as a filmmaker who is sure of what he wants, a quality notable in his previous films Appan One that also rarely deviated from its dark and disturbing tone.

The imaginary village evokes the style often seen in Malayalam films of the early 1990s, while the treatment is of a much more recent vintage. Thus, originality may not be one of the film’s strong points, but the things the filmmaker creates within these familiar tropes are certainly capable of holding our attention. The part where one day the crows disappear from the village, and the man who has made it his life’s mission to drive away the crows feels a sense of loneliness, or Abi’s (Lukman) desire to return to the village with his mother. The best part is the house of his father’s second wife and the two women gradually living together are some examples of this.

Mazu, who wrote the screenplay, fills the film with a multitude of characters, yet manages to give most of them a distinct identity. But, Perumani’s The main concern remains Nazar’s character and his impending marriage with Fatima. Nazar is a toxic character who becomes suspicious even after seeing an innocuous painting of a pair of deer in his fiancée’s bedroom. He will make every effort to prove his suspicions. Manesh Madhavan’s wide-angle shots are used to satirize such characters, including those who turn the village into a den of superstition. On the other hand, his camera treats Fatima and Ramlath (Radhika Radhakrishnan) with dignity, although their claims of independence are not portrayed as loud, but as somewhat natural.

perumani Doesn’t take itself too seriously which helps present a fairly charming film that leaves a folkloric flavour.

Perumani is currently running in theaters