24 frames per second

Standard procedure for an upcoming election: all registered gun-owners in a locality are required to deposit their weapons at the nearest police station, and collect them back after the election is over. Everyone in a particular locality has done so, save for one retired army officer named Appu Pillai. When he is unreachable on the phone, the cop calls his son Ajay to follow up. The son is in the process of getting married at the registrar’s office. He says his father would be at home, so the cop goes over. The gun, however, is missing. A complaint has to be filed. If someone else fires the gun and does some damage, the responsibility for the mishap also falls on the gun owner.

While all this is going on, Ajay’s new bride Aparna tries to fit into a lonely house on a sprawling estate occupied by only two men: her husband and father-in-law. Her husband, a widower with a son who has been missing for three years, can barely manage a smile with the greatest of effort. Every so often, he has to make a trip to some far-off city to identify if a child’s body found in a morgue is that of his son. Imagine Rebecca, but gloomier.

Dinjith Ayyathan’s Kishkindha Kaandam begins with this gloomy premise, and slowly deepens the mystery. A bunch of cops and forest officers dealing with the spectre of a missing gun, and where it appears to have been found. A buried skeleton. A local ex-Naxal who now makes a living making some sort of hooch. A frequent visitor to the estate who appears to be the old man’s ex-colleague in the army. The performances (Vijayaraghavan and Asif Ali are fantastic as father and son trapped in their own private hell), the camerawork (gorgeous and ominous at the same time) and the background score do a great job in keeping us intrigued and invested.

We realize early on that things are not as they seem, and so we, along with Aparna (who knows as little about this world as we do), slowly try to piece things together. Dinjith Ayyathan, working off an incredibly intelligent script by Bahul Ramesh, leads us slowly through the plot, pacing out the revelations as each little thing clicks in Aparna’s mind. This way of letting a plot unfold is not new. Nor is the idea of pulling the rug out from under our feet in the final act – we’ve had that happen to us before. But what Kishkindha Kaandam manages is something altogether more interesting: the successive reveals bring neither shock nor surprise, but empathy.

This is a much kinder film than it appears at first, and that might just be the best reason to see it.