Ticket to Kerala – The Story of Malayalam Cinema by SR Praveen (Published by Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2026, starts on a high note, with the promise that it will open eyes to what is now being called the golden age of Malayalam cinema. It wants to explain why this small industry, long admired in fragments, has become the subject of wider Indian attention. But after the initial suggestion that the book will say something large and revelatory, it settles into something far more familiar: a summary-led passage through notable moments, films, recycled interviews and personalities.
There is no doubt that Malayalam cinema is at an interesting juncture. Younger directors, writers, actors and technicians have challenged established stalwarts with new structures, tonal shifts, narrative risks and cinematic styles. But that, in itself, is not new. Malayalam cinema has had several such turns before. The so-called discovery of Malayalam cinema by the pan-Indian viewer says as much about the ignorance of Indian film culture as it does about Malayalam cinema’s recent brilliance.
For decades, Malayalam cinema shone at awards, walked away with national honours, produced some of India’s finest actors and filmmakers, and yet remained a footnote in the national film press. It would be relegated to the last pages of Filmfare, and even then it mattered when someone like Khalid Mohamed chose to interview Mammootty. But then, that was also the time Chiranjeevi would adorn the cover of India Today. These signal that the national film conversation had only briefly looked beyond Bollywood’s own mirror. The preface to the book by Namrata Joshi underline this. Even learned critics who wrote seriously about Indian cinema often came late to Malayalam cinema, or saw it from the outside.
The need for a harder push
This is where Ticket to Kerala needed to push harder. Why did this discovery happen only now? Malayalam cinema did not suddenly become intelligent because viewers found it on streaming platforms during and after COVID. It had long had literary depth, political anxieties, comic intelligence, formal restlessness and a stubborn relationship with realism. What changed was access: subtitles, OTT platforms, social media conversation, migration, young Malayalis living across Indian cities, Telugu and Tamil viewing circuits….
But visibility is not the same as arrival.The claim of pan-Indian acceptance needs qualification. What has emerged is less a clean national embrace of Malayalam cinema than a stronger pan-South circulation, with occasional breakthroughs elsewhere in the theatre circuit. Films such as Premalu travelled in Telugu, while Premam had already shown how a Malayalam youth film could find deep affection in Tamil Nadu. But this traffic was never one-way.
Kerala has long been a receptive market for Tamil cinema, and Telugu stars such as Allu Arjun had already built a following in the state through dubbed releases. Malayalam cinema’s recent travel should be read as part of a wider South Indian exchange, not hyped into a sudden national conquest.
Limitations outweigh the strengths
S. R. Praveen knows the world of Malayalam cinema, at least from the past decade plus. That is both the book’s strength and its limitation. So, at its best, Ticket to Keralais an affectionate and accessible map for readers who are arriving late and want to know where to begin. At its weakest, it becomes a curated watchlist. The harder question remains underdeveloped: what, exactly, made this moment different from the earlier waves of Malayalam cinema?
The book’s claim of a new boldness is problematic. Praveen writes of caste and gender surfacing in recent films in ways that question the misogyny and casteist abuse normalised by parts of the previous era. A claim that is too generic. Malayalam cinema did not discover moral complexity of late. MT Vasudevan Nair, KG George, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, Padmarajan, Bharathan and Shyamaprasad had already made cinema that approached life with uncertainty, contradiction and unapologetic honesty. That is why Shyamaprasad’s own observation in the book becomes more useful than some of Praveen’s conclusions. The best writers and filmmakers, Shyamaprasad suggests, were those who approached life differently and saw truth in a more nuanced manner.
So, the question is not whether new Malayalam cinema is bold. The question is whether it is genuinely modern. Much of it is alert to caste, gender, violence, masculinity and power. But some of them also carry the burden of political fashion, progressive signalling and ready-made positions. Such films know what must be said but the directors are less interested in the contradictions beneath what is being said.
The oversights that seem deliberate
The absence of Lucifer is also difficult to overlook. Whatever one thinks of the film, it matters. Written by Murali Gopy (no mention in the book), directed by Prithviraj Sukumaran and led by Mohanlal, it showed that Malayalam cinema’s contemporary transformation was not confined to restrained realism, small films, new faces and progressive themes. It also included the reinvention of the star-led commercial potboiler. Lucifer proved that the old star system had not simply collapsed under the new wave. It could be repackaged for a changed audience. The so-called ‘new’ Malayalam cinema is also the persistence of mass cinema, the recalibration of star image, and writers like Murali Gopy attempting to build a socio-political universe out of Malayalam cinema’s own anxieties. A serious account of the period has to hold both worlds together: the intimate film and the spectacle, the new actor and the old star, the indie-coded breakthroughs such as eko and the commercial wins.
The rise of the Muslim voice in Malayalam cinema
There is another major absence in the book: the rise of genuine Muslim voice in Malayalam cinema. Malayalam cinema had represented Muslim life before, but often from the outside, or through the lens of social-problem melodrama. Films such as Umma, Kuttikkuppayam and Ummachu brought Muslim households and community anxieties into the mainstream, but they still belonged to a period where the community was often being observed or sentimentalised.
The contemporary shift is different. The newer films do not merely place Muslim characters inside Malayalam cinema. They allow Muslim worlds to generate the cinema’s rhythm, humour, language, music, masculinity, tenderness and contradiction. KL 10 Patthu, Sudani from Nigeria, Halal Love Story and Thallumaala are important not because they are “Muslim films”, but because they make a region, a dialect and a cultural atmosphere speak in its own voice. Football fields, Gulf memories, mosque-adjacent lives, family codes, wedding cultures, friendships, food, prayer, slang and local male performance become part of the film’s inner life. That is one of the clearest changes in the period Praveen is evaluating. Yet the book does not give it the weight it deserves.
An incomplete and conveniently missed past
The same incompleteness appears in its treatment of Malayalam cinema’s past including the absence of several directors. For example, a filmmaker like Jayaraj, who moved from Desadanam and Kaliyattam to Karunam, Shantham, 4 The People, Ottaal and Bhayanakam cannot be treated as peripheral to the story of Malayalam cinema. He worked across art cinema, popular cinema, literary adaptation, spiritual drama, campus unrest, political anxiety and ecological fable. He is not easy to classify. That is why he belongs in the argument.
Blessy is another figure who needed fuller treatment. To underwrite him is to miss one of Malayalam cinema’s most important bridges between the older emotional-literary tradition and the contemporary revival. Kaazhcha, Thanmathra, Bhramaram, Pranayam and Aadujeevitham show a director working through memory, grief, illness, migration, ageing, masculinity, faith and survival with a seriousness that sits outside the fashionable new-generation vocabulary.
Ranjith, too, cannot be reduced to a footnote. He is a difficult figure to place because he represents both the problem and the transition. Yes, he helped script and sustain a strain of Malayalam cinema that lionised the wounded masculine ego, the feudal saviour, the cultured strongman and the aristocratic male fantasy. But that is only one part of Ranjith’s place in the industry. He also wrote and made films that caught other registers of Malayali life: the devotional innocence of Nandanam, the cinema-memory of Thirakkatha, the historical and sexual violence of Paleri Manikyam, the comic self-delusion of Pranchiyettan and the Saint, and the social anxiety around alcoholism in Spirit.
Sreenivasan, in particular, deserved far more than passing treatment. He is one of the key architects of the Malayali middle-class self-image: insecure, clever, hypocritical, wounded, aspirational and politically exhausted. Sandesham is a case in point. To suggest that the film’s lampooning of intellectual discussions made critical analysis uncool is to overstate the case and underread the film. Sandesham did not make thinking uncool. It made pretension visible and understood how ideology could enter the household.
Malayalam cinema’s revival was not built by a few approved films or a handful of preferred filmmakers. It came from a messy forest of contributors, including those whose work is ideologically or morally uncomfortable but historically unavoidable. One could argue that the book is not Malayalam cinema’s history. But these arguments would not have surfaced if Praveen stuck to his exploration of the period of cinema he wanted to talk about and not digressed to give us a history that Wikipedia would tell with no frills.
Whatever happened to Mohanlal?
The book is also too willing, at times, to turn shock into progress. 22 Female Kottayam was undeniably an inflection point in the representation of female rage but way too regressive. Shouldn’t Tessa’s revenge invite harder questions? Was it a radical act of agency, or did it remain trapped within the same violent grammar that Malayalam cinema had long used against women? The tendency towards reverence about clear author-favourites appears elsewhere too. Fahadh Faasil’s performance in Aavesham is elevated in a way that seems to forget that uninhibited performance did not begin with him. Mohanlal built a career on precisely that quality: the ability to appear unprepared, unguarded and yet completely in control.
The Mohanlal chapter is where the book’s imbalance becomes most visible. To begin a chapter on one of Malayalam cinema’s greatest actors through the sourness of his Hema Committee press conference response may be personally honest, but it is critically limiting. Mohanlal’s public response to an industry crisis is a legitimate subject. But should it become the emotional doorway into his artistic life? The comparison with Mammootty is also too easy. Mammootty’s greatness lies in discipline, passion and the ability to disappear into selected roles. Mohanlal’s greatness lies elsewhere: in the collapse of performance into behaviour. To say he leaves a trace of himself in his roles only smacks of prejudice.
Peripheral throughout
The peripheral appraoch applies to the book’s treatment of women and institutional reform. Parvathy Thiruvothu’s career, the WCC and the Hema Committee report are important, but a gender history of Malayalam cinema cannot begin there. The exploitation of women in the industry has a much longer and darker history, including the case of Vijayasree. Nor is it enough to invoke the Hema report without asking what happened after it, why its recommendations remained stalled for so long and how quickly institutions learned to absorb outrage without transforming themselves.
Ticket to Kerala is readable but way too skimmable. For a reader newly arriving at Malayalam cinema, it probably offers a useful map. But the book needed a harder account of how region, caste, gender, religion, labour, stardom, politics, distribution and audience change shaped the cinema’s present. The book opens the door but it does not go deep enough into the house. In short, a great idea is left underexplored and stymied by the author’s biases.
