Brahmastra: Part One – SHIVA cost 400 crore rupees. Game Changer cost about the same. Adipurush is estimated between 500 and 700 crore. So much spent, so little to show for it. You can buy all the stars, all the screens, but you can’t buy taste.
Money goes a lot further in Malayalam cinema. Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra has a reported budget of 30-33 crore. With this modest amount, director Dominic Arun and co-writer Santhy Balachandran build a sturdy, vivid world, full of personality and charm. The natural comparison is with Minnal murali (2021), another deft, low-budget Malayalam superhero film. But in its fusing of Indian folklore with breezy Hollywood heroics, Lokah is really the film Brahmastra desperately wanted, and failed, to be.
Lokah begins with Chandra (Kalyani Priyadarshan) escaping a burning building and the woman sent to kill her. Her crashing through a window segues into animated, era-spanning opening credits. Already this is a change from the standard Indian action film: no elaborate entry shot, flight instead of fight. The practical nature of the filmmaking carries over into the storytelling—a fantasy film whose heroes have the good sense to be wary and retreat when necessary.
Chandra moves into a dusty apartment in Bengaluru, across the street from Sunny, who’s smitten at first sight (it’s almost like Naslen is continuing to play his character from Alappuzha Gymkhana). She takes a night job at a bakery, keeps to herself. Nothing about her suggests a normal person, but Arun keeps us in the realm of the ordinary for a while, giving us only glimpses of her powers (super speed, super strength). It’s only after she unexpectedly accepts a party invite from Sunny that there’s a delicious revelation.
[mild spoiler in the next paragraph]
Alert viewers might notice that Chandra doesn’t enter the threshold of Sunny’s flat but waits until she’s invited in. That and a spooked cat and her wary reaction to a bleeding hand might be enough for some to guess what the film confirms a little later: Chandra is a vampire, a yakshini to be precise. To be even more precise, she’s Kalliyankattu Neeli, a malevolent spirit in Kerala folklore, transformed here from a vengeful ghost into an immortal protector.
Arun avoids the protracted flashback that most Indian franchise films use now. Instead, Chandra’s history is revealed in a crisp 15-minute passage set centuries ago, involving a cruel king, oppressed tribals and a little girl who gains superpowers by accident. It culminates in young Neeli (the scene-stealing Durga C. Vinod) obliterating the king’s enforcers, a fierce, thrilling set piece in a film that uses them sparingly. The feral mutant from Logan might have been an inspiration, but the sequence in Lokah is its own thing, a charged mix of social commentary, Indian folk traditions and American comic book tropes.
In its second half, the film starts to broaden its ambit. Chandra is revealed to belong to a group of superbeings who intervene wherever there’s conflict on earth. We’re introduced to a few of them—there are two crowd-pleasing cameos—but not so much that Chandra is pushed to the margins of the film. It’s a welcome, important decision. This is the first Indian film built around a female superhero, and a rare action franchise to kick off with a female lead. It’s only right that it remain her story till the end.
Several Indian horror films of late have explored the idea of the avenging female spirit. Lokah expands on this by making Chandra a dispenser of justice, not revenge. Her victims are male harassers, abusers, traffickers. The primary antagonist, Nachiyappa (Sandy), is a hateful, misogynist cop who can’t bring himself to salute his superior officer, a woman. It feels right that Malayalam cinema—an industry shaken up in recent times by the work of the Women in Cinema Collective—would give us a female superhero whose main focus seems to be on preventing crimes against women.
Since its release last week, Lokah has been accused of being ‘Hinduphobic’ and showing Bengaluru in a bad light (never mind that the offending dialogue is said by the evil cop). Lokah isn’t a political film, but it’s clear what its politics are. Bengaluru is a pointed choice, as is making Nachiyappa both devout and psychotic, preaching moral values while terrifying his own mother. In the flashback, trouble starts when the tribals are forbidden from entering a temple. In the present day, the National Investigation Agency is used to frame fake charges—the second Malayalam film this year after L2: Employment to imagine such a scenario (and to imply the home minister is up to no good).
Kalyani’s steady, serious gaze lends Chandra a necessary gravitas, though it’s nice to see her drop her guard now and then in the impish presence of Naslen. It’s such a sensible conception of a superhero: black tracksuit, black sneakers, black and red jacket, red highlights in her hair that shimmer when she zips around. The follow-up film could well have a bigger budget, less of a DIY quality. I’m excited to see what Arun manages with a larger canvas. But even if it goes awry, we’ll always have Chandra.