A still from ‘Perumani’

Certain devious minds revel in cooking up lies and setting people against each other so that they can make gains from the conflict that would follow. Just like in the real world, the fictional village Perumani — from the film of the same name — also has a couple of such people. The lie that they conjure, and put up secretly on the village noticeboard in the cover of the night, has to do with the wedding between the local richman Nazar (Vinay Forrt) and Fathima (Deepa Thomas).

Filmmaker KB Maju’s third film Perumani, which begins with a fascinating animated folk tale about a curse that visited the village aeons ago, takes off from this lie planted on the notice board with almost every event in the film getting neatly tied around it. One of the things that works for it is that he never shifts from the wacky tone that he sets in these opening minutes, even when the situation turns grim in the screenplay. Yet, it works in harmony, never standing out as a discordant note. In achieving this, he appears to be a filmmaker who is sure of what he wants, a quality notable in his previous film Appan too, which hardly ever wavered from its dark and disturbing tone.

The fictional village has created harks back to the kind 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 grabbing our attention. The part where the crows disappear from the village one fine day, and the man who has made driving crows away his life’s calling, feels a sense of loneliness, or the finely executed part of Abi (Lukman) returning to the village with his mother to the house of his father’s second wife and the two women slowly getting along are some of the examples.

Maju, who has written the screenplay, populates the film with many characters, yet succeeds in lending most of them a distinct identity. But, Perumani’s central concern remains the character of Nazar and his impending wedding with Fathima. Nazar is the kind of toxic character who would get suspicious even on seeing an innocuous painting of a pair of deer in his fiancee’s bedroom. He would go to great lengths to prove his suspicions. Manesh Madhavan’s wide-angle shots are used to lampoon such characters, including the ones who turn the village into a den of superstition. On the other hand, his camera treats Fathima and Ramlath (Radhika Radhakrishnan) with dignity, although their assertions of independence are not portrayed loudly, but as something natural.

Perumani does not take itself too seriously which helps deliver a fairly engaging film that leaves the aftertaste of a folktale.

Perumani is currently running in theatres