There are movies that urge you to look at them from your personal perspective. ekõ (on Netflix) does that. Here is why:
On the surface, this Dinjith Ayyathan film, written by Bahul Ramesh (who also weilds the camera) looks like a revenge thriller. Woman betrayed by men, woman imprisoned under the guise of protection, woman finally taking control. The feminist reading is almost too obvious – and critics picked it up, praising the film for its “strong female protagonist” and “subversion of patriarchal structures.”
These observations maybe insufficient.
Because what kept pulling me back to think about the film days after watching was something else entirely. The omnipresence of nature – not as backdrop or even a metaphor. But as the real protagonist. And nature, in this film, is unmistakably She. The copy below has spoilers.
The dogs that know it all
Let us start with the dogs, because they are a brilliant structural choice – and the one many have considered as plot device.
Kuriachan (Saurabh Sachdeva), a mysterious dog breeder, masters them and believes he controls them as his instruments. He believes that they make him invincible and pride over them as proof of dominance over nature.
While he is on the run, the rare Malaysian breeds he brought along with his ‘catch’, Mlaathi (Biana Momin/Sim Zhi Fei) feeds them for years. She is not seen to be commanding or event training – just feeding, and building a relationship through the most basic act of care.
When the climatic twist happens, building on the refrain we hear often in the film that protection and restriction are the same thing, the dogs as may seem on the surface are not betraying their master. They’re responding to ecological truth – Mlaathi’s genuine relationship vs Kuriachan’s extracted compliance.
This matters because it positions everything that we see in the film outside human moral frameworks. The dogs do not care about right and wrong in the ‘human’ sense. They care about reciprocity, authenticity and care versus momentary dominance.
This is how the film becomes something rarer than a revenge thriller because it delivers a story where nature’s logic supersedes human law.
Peeyoos and pornography
Peeyoos (Sandeep Pradeep), the caretaker of Mlaathi, confounds viewers. He’s shown as innocent but mysterious; he is gentle but has an unsettling streak. The camera never tells us who he really is: it just us how the world sees him.
Then we see something totally ‘off topic.’ Peeyoos writes pornographic stories, which seem to be pretty popular with a sleazy magazine, even as he writes them anonymously. Why does a man living in near-complete isolation, channel his energy into erotic writing?
A little research landed on Freud, however, unfashionable he may be now. He has observed that sexual imagination and natural instinct share the same root. Both existing before civilization taught us to suppress them. Pornography, in this reading, is suppressed nature finding the only outlet available.
Peeyoos lives entirely by instinct – loyalty, territory, protection. His world is absolute black and white – with no compromise. This is how animals operate. After all, they do not see in 3D. The pornographic writing is his howl from inside the so-called cultural cage, that basic instinct demanding expression even when social circumstances forbid action.
The snake that brings justice
The snake bite that kills the policemen has been dismissed by some viewers as convenient plotting. It might also be a fundamental misunderstanding of what the film is doing.
In Kerala’s serpent worship traditions – which are older than Hinduism, older than most organized religion – snakes function as agents of ecological balance. They don’t punish sin. They punish disturbance, intereference and the violation of reciprocity.
When the two policemen deceive Peeyoos, gaining his trust by pretending to be loggers, then attempting arrest, they are committing what nature recognizes as betrayal. Legally, they’re doing their job. Ecologically, they have violated fundamental trust.
The snake doesn’t care about legal authority. It probably sensed the false pretense and the broken reciprocity. So it acted as per nature’s court, not human-centric morality. After all, the moment’s truth favored Peeyoos, and nature responded accordingly.
Kuriachan’s wild streak
Kuriachan embodies one facet of nature – ferocity, territoriality, hunger. He devours life, land, women. He believes nature is something to harness, dogs something to breed, women something to claim.
And the film tells us something about domestication, which is not about control but a fragile temporary bargain. “Protection” throughout ekõ is shown as captivity in disguise. Mlaathi’s Malaysian husband restricts her movements out of fear and possession. Kuriachan trains dogs as instruments of defense. Both men believe they’re protecting when they are imprisoning – knowingly or unknowingly, for a reason or not.
This connects to something larger about how we treat nature itself – we want to ‘protect’ wilderness by restricting access, we want to ‘preserve’ species by confining them (look at the giant zoo of the Ambanis). Protection just becomes another form of domination.
The retreat that is a prison
The matriarch’s isolation in that mountain retreat is a powerful allegory. Kuriachan built it “somewhere up away from mankind, full of mystery” as his partner-in-crime Mohan Pothan (Vineeth) says.
That is a fantasy many of us may harbour. To get away from it all. To return to nature. To hopefully find peace in isolation.
But the film reveals the truth beneath this fantasy: retreat can become prison. (Unless probably you are Pankaj Mishra). The withdrawal we seek for freedom can often transform into captivity, telling us that there is something deeper in how we romanticise wilderness.
Parashakti: The She who wakes Shiva
The film’s closing image – Mlaathi taking control, defining her freedom – operates on two levels. On the surface, it’s individual female empowerment. A woman reclaiming agency from the man and society who tried to own her.
But beneath that is something cosmological. In Hindu mythology, Shiva – the ultimate destructive force – remains inert until awakened by Parashakti, the supreme feminine energy. The masculine principle, no matter how powerful, depends on feminine activation.
ekõ stages this truth. Every male character’s intentions – Kuriachan’s exploitation, Mohan Pothan’s outrage, the lawmakers’ probes – are only mapped to the inevitable: Mlaathi’s liberation.
This connects to the film’s nature-as-protagonist appreciation. Because in Hinduism’s cosmology, nature is feminine. Prakriti – that primoridal energy from which everything emerges and eventually dissolves.
When Mlaathi emerges at the end, it is primordial nature asserting its authority over what was temporarily (even if that period means decades or centuries) undermined by masculine presumptions.
Kuriachan’s ‘rescue’ of Mlaathi from Malaysia – claiming her, stripping her identity – mirrors exactly how colonizers and patriarchs have always treated countries, women and nature. They have claimed to save (read the East India Company) while subjugating, and converting protection as an alibi for possession.
What the film understands – and what makes it more than just a revenge thriller – is that such subjugation is temporary. Nature watches, accumulates power, waits for the moment when forces align. And She acts. As floods, tsunamis, quakes…
The intruders who never understand
Every person who comes searching for Kuriachan – Narain’s navy officer, the police, the various pursuers – arrives as an intruder into Mlaathi’s physical space. But little do they know that are intruding into a domain that operates by entirely different rules.
They believe they have information and control, and want resolution. What they don’t realize is that they are entering a territory that doesn’t honour their authority.
The local belief that Mlaathi practices black magic is also historically consistent with the stereotypes. Women who operate outside the patriarchal order have always been named as dangerous, supernatural.
But the film validates this “black magic” rather than explaining it. Mlaathi’s power is definitely mysterious. And we are never allowed to enter her consciousness. She remains, like nature itself, stoic and nonchalant.
This nonachalance is just how things are. The intruders fundamentally misunderstand the space they’ve entered and try to apply human law (or human rules) in a domain governed by natural law.
Nature’s multiple faces
What makes ekõ work cinematically is how it captures nature in full complexity. We do not just see romanticized wilderness but nature in all its contradictions. The Western Ghats location provides landscapes that shift from serene to menacing, and from nurturing to terrifying.
This multivalence also extends through every character. The wildness in Kuriachan. The stoicness in Mlaathi. The instinctual purity in Peeyoos. The territorial loyalty in the dogs. Each embodies a different aspect of natural force.
Nature in ekõ is not benevolent. When imbalance grows it acts through dogs, through snakes, through women who’ve been feeding animals for years while watching through binoculars, waiting.
And Sabarimala…
The film also brought into mind Sabarimala. The debates have framed it as women’s rights versus religious (casteist, superstitious, contrived) tradition.
But it also raises a question: Who has the right to enter any sacred space, and if so, on what and whose terms?
At Sabarimala (and every shrine that has such rules), women aged 10 to 50 are restricted not because they were unworthy, but probably because their presence is too potent; so much so that their collective Shakti could undo the ascetic order. This is not to reaffirm prejudices but to see the question in a different light – aligned with nature.
ekõ takes that logic and inverts it. Here, it is men who trespass into a feminine domain (both nature and Mlaathi’s home) only to discover that nature, like Shakti, enforces her own restrictions.
The question, when it comes to temples, is not who may enter or who may remain. In all cases, the ultimate authority is not the state, not the priesthood, not the law – it has to be Nature.
You have parallels in other cultures too; in Sri Lanka, Gananath Obeyesekere, writing about the Goddess Pattini, describes the complex relationship between humans and the divine in certain religious traditions, where deities require specific forms of respect and ritual subordination.
Why all these matter…
Few Malayalam films in recent years have achieved such a strong synthesis of myth, ecology, gender politics and psychoanalysis. Many have collapsed under the weight of their own symbolism.
ekõ stands apart because it doesn’t announce its intentions. It just shows nature operating according to natural law.
The film does something conventional screenwriting abhors: that justice can emerge from non-human sources. That audiences can sit with mystery, with inscrutability, with forces we observe but never fully understand.
And maybe that’s what makes you think about and want to respond to ekõ: the film’s refusal to reduce nature to metaphor or woman to symbol. Yet both remain irreducibly themselves: powerful, patient, capable of violence, operating by logics that predate and will outlast human civilization.
It tells us that Nature watches and remembers. And when the time comes, Nature – She – takes the last word. Finally, when the credits scrolled, it was not surprising that the writer of the film himself shot it: Only he could have seen and captured nature as he wanted.
So, if you are watching ekõ or want to rewatch it, watch it from the perspective of nature: View the film from nature’s view – and maybe it may not seem as another revenge thriller.
ENDS
നിങ്ങളുടെ അഭിപ്രായങ്ങൾ രേഖപ്പെടുത്തുക