Purusha Pretham (2023) [Hindi-Malayalam]

Purusha Pretham, focuses on Inspector Sebastian Purusha Pretham as he handles an unidentified male body and becomes entangled in a procedural, personal and emotional maze. Somewhere between his personal troubles and procedural flaws, all hell breaks loose when he misplaces the corpse. Will Sebastian be able to sort out the mess before the deceased man’s family arrives to identify him?

Living and the dead have become unpredictable now,” says a character in Purusha Pretham (Male Ghost). In Aavasavyuham, it was a living being that caused much chaos. In Purusha Pretham, it’s a dead body that does it. In his new feature streaming on SonyLIV, Krishand portrays a group of characters trapped in perpetual anxiety.

This, of course, gives rise to some absurd situations like in Aavasavyuham; this time, though, Krishand’s treatment of the material is notably different from that film even though both share similar visual styles. It’s a strange beast and takes a while to get used to. Given the title, which is police parlance for a male corpse, and how the entire film pivots around one incident, the discovery of an unidentified cadaver, brace yourself for a fairly long but understandable preoccupation with the morbid. Naturally, it’s not an ideal film to watch in the morning—or when feeling under the weather.

There are places where one feels the conversations are not that engrossing and needlessly elongated. But fret not. Krishand keeps it easy by extracting humour out of the most mundane conversations. There is a whole gag involving the police serving lemonade to guests and each other.

Another has a superior conducting an orientation session where all the juniors ask questions just to appear ‘studious’. I cracked up at the scene where a Purusha Pretham query about Vitamin D deficiency gets a cop transferred to traffic, hoping he will get “enough sunshine.”

A notable aspect of Krishand’s work is that people don’t react as how you expect them to. The same goes for Purusha Pretham. For instance, a suspect’s mother tells Sebastien to “teach him a lesson” instead of getting dramatic and pleading with him to let her son go.

Krishand’s brand of humour manifests itself in inventive ways this time around. It’s not always loud or escapist. Take the situation where a group of cops hope the corpse floated to the other side as the opposite would mean their jurisdiction. It’s a job that, given a chance, they would rather avoid, but strangely enough, some cops think dealing with the stink of corpses is better than being out in the city doing something more complicated like, say, a lathi charge.