Malayalam Cinema (Mollywood): A Critical Guide

01What is Malayalam cinema, structurally?

Malayalam cinema is the Malayalam-language film industry of India, headquartered loosely between Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram, with a production geography that until the 1980s ran heavily through the studio infrastructure of Madras (now Chennai) and only later consolidated inside Kerala itself. It is one of the four largest language industries in Indian cinema after Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, but on every commercial metric it is by some distance the smallest — roughly 150 to 200 features a year, average budgets that until very recently sat in the ₹2 to ₹5 crore band, and a domestic theatrical market that the producers' council, KFPA, has periodically described as fragile. What it has in place of scale is an unusual economic feature that critics like Baradwaj Rangan have flagged repeatedly on Film Companion South: a mid-budget Malayalam film built around an established writer-director-actor combination can routinely recoup its negative cost five to ten times over through a combined theatrical, satellite and OTT pipeline. Manjummel Boys (2024) — a roughly ₹20 crore production that grossed over ₹240 crore worldwide — is the spectacular version of a pattern that has been running quietly under the industry's surface since Lal Jose's Classmates (2006).

The defining structural fact is the screenplay's centrality. Where Tamil mainstream cinema has historically built around the star vehicle and Telugu around mass-set-piece spectacle, the Malayalam middle film has been organised around a writer's voice — Padmarajan and John Paul, A.K. Lohithadas and Sreenivasan, then Syam Pushkaran, Bobby–Sanjay, Sajeev Pazhoor, Unni R., Muhsin Parari. That bias toward writing is the practical reason the parallel-cinema sensibility could keep being absorbed back into the commercial mainstream. The script was already the protagonist.

02The early decades, the studio era and Chemmeen (1928 to 1965)

The first Malayalam feature, J.C. Daniel's Vigathakumaran (1928), survives only in fragments and as written record, but Daniel — a Nadar Christian from Travancore who built his own studio at Trivandrum, cast a Dalit actress named P.K. Rosy in the lead, and was effectively run out of the industry by the caste backlash that followed — is the foundational ghost the industry has only recently begun to honour publicly. The first Malayalam talkie, Balan, arrived in 1938, eleven years after Alam Ara, and through the 1940s and 1950s production was routed almost entirely through the Madras and Salem studios because Kerala had no working sound-stage infrastructure of its own. Films were shot in Tamil Nadu, dubbed in Malayalam and shipped back across the Western Ghats.

The shift began in the 1950s with directors like P. Bhaskaran, Ramu Kariat and the writer Thoppil Bhasi using cinema as part of the wider Kerala literary and political left. Their work culminated in Ramu Kariat's Chemmeen (1965), adapted from Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's 1956 novel about a coastal fishing community on the Alappuzha shore. Salil Chowdhury's score, Marcus Bartley's monochrome cinematography of the surf at night, and the film's serious treatment of caste, gender and a marriage organised through commerce rather than romance made Chemmeen the first South Indian film to win the National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Read against everything that followed, it is the prototype: a literary source, a left-leaning realism, a coastal location shot with cinematographic seriousness, and a moral argument that the popular audience was assumed capable of receiving.

03The parallel-cinema generation (1972 to 1990)

The Malayalam parallel cinema began with Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Swayamvaram (1972), a Film Finance Corporation-funded debut about a young couple's slow grinding-down by the city, shot with a Bressonian discipline that critics like Madhu Eravankara would later read as a deliberate refusal of the song-and-dance template the rest of the industry had taken for granted. Adoor's body of work — Kodiyettam (1977), Elippathayam (1981, BFI's Sutherland Trophy at the London Film Festival), Mukhamukham (1984), Anantaram (1987), Mathilukal (1990) — has been on retrospective programmes from Cannes to Venice for over five decades. Around him formed a generation of auteurs largely funded by the FFC and later the NFDC: G. Aravindan, whose Thampu (1978), Esthappan (1980) and Chidambaram (1985, National Award for Best Film) carried a Tarkovsky-Bergman lineage into Kerala's village landscape; K.G. George, whose Yavanika (1982) and Adaminte Variyellu (1983) brought a procedural sharpness rare in Indian cinema of the period; John Abraham, whose Amma Ariyan (1986) was funded entirely through small public subscriptions raised by his Odessa Collective across Kerala; and Shaji N. Karun, whose Piravi (1989) won the Caméra d'Or special mention at Cannes that year.

What distinguished the Malayalam parallel cinema from its parallel-cinema cousins in Bengal, Karnataka or Hindi was reach. Where the Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak films circulated mainly through festivals, and Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani depended on Doordarshan and NFDC underwriting, an Adoor or an Aravindan film played in regular Kerala theatres. The FFSI chapters, the IFFK in Thiruvananthapuram, the long-running film columns in Mathrubhumi and Kalakaumudi, and a literate magazine-reading public meant the auteur film and the popular release shared a single audience. That overlap is the structural feature on which everything Malayalam cinema did later rests, and it is treated at length in the dedicated movement hub on Malayalam parallel cinema.

What distinguished the Malayalam parallel cinema from its parallel-cinema cousins in Bengal, Karnataka or Hindi was reach.

04The 1980s middle cinema and the Bharathan-Padmarajan-MT axis

Running parallel to the auteur stream — and often borrowing its actors, writers and cinematographers — was the 1980s middle-cinema wave, the period the older Kerala critic GP Ramachandran has called the industry's true classical phase. Bharathan and Padmarajan, often grouped with K.G. George under the loose label of the Malayalam new wave, made character-driven films at mid-budget scale that were neither festival entries nor studio melodramas. Bharathan's Chamaram (1980), Thakara (1979) and Vaishali (1988) sat alongside Padmarajan's Thoovanathumbikal (1987) — whose Jayakrishnan-Clara dynamic, the rain falling outside the lodge window, the long careful conversation about whether love can survive the existence of money, has been written about more often than perhaps any other Malayalam scene of the decade — Namukku Parkkan Munthiri Thoppukal (1986), Aparan (1988) and Innale (1989). The screenwriter MT Vasudevan Nair, the Jnanpith novelist who came to film as a writer first and a director second, gave the era its literary backbone with Nirmalyam (1973), Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1989) and his collaborations with Hariharan and Bharathan.

Padmarajan's death from a cardiac arrest at the Hotel Paramount Towers in Kozhikode on 24 January 1991 ended that phase abruptly, though Bharathan would carry on until his own early death in 1998. In parallel, Sathyan Anthikkad and the writer Sreenivasan built the Malayalam family-comedy template through Nadodikkattu (1987), Pattanapravesham (1988) and Sandesham (1991), and Sibi Malayil began his partnership with A.K. Lohithadas with Kireedam (1989), the tragedy whose final image of a destroyed Sethumadhavan crouched in the dust still functions in Kerala as critical shorthand for what Mohanlal at his peak could do with a face. By 1989 the two-star economy of Mohanlal and Mammootty was fully in place — each carrying both art and commercial work, each with three or four releases a year, each backed by a different writers' room.

05Stardom and the actor's actor: Mohanlal, Mammootty, Fahadh

The Malayalam industry's most distinctive feature is its parallel star economy. Mohanlal and Mammootty have been carrying lead roles continuously since the early 1980s — a forty-five-year run with no real industrial parallel anywhere else in India. The reading inside Kerala has always been finer than the standard fan-club opposition. Mammootty, trained as a lawyer at Ernakulam, is the actor of physical containment — Adoor's Mathilukal (1990) and Vidheyan (1994), Bharathan's Ponthan Mada (1994), Shyamaprasad's Ore Kadal (2007), Ram's Peranbu (2018, in Tamil) — three National Awards for Best Actor and a late-career run through Mammootty Kampany that has put him in Lijo Jose Pellissery's Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (2023), Jeo Baby's Kaathal – The Core (2023) and Rahul Sadasivan's Bramayugam (2024). Mohanlal is the actor of release — the body that carries the kathakali in Vanaprastham (1999), the village patriarch in Devasuram (1993), the mass-hero pivot of Lucifer (2019). Critics like CS Venkiteswaran have written carefully about how the 1990s Mohanlal masala film, especially the Ranjith-scripted Aaraam Thampuran (1997) and Narasimham (2000), encodes a particular feudal-Nair masculinity that the canon now has to read against itself rather than around.

Fahadh Faasil arrived in the 2010s as a deliberate refusal of stardom — an actor who works in mid-budget films, takes supporting roles when the script needs them, and uses his face like a cinematographer (the silence at the police-station table in Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, the unbroken gaze in the closing shot of Joji). He is the medium of the New Generation in the same way Mohanlal was the medium of the 1980s middle cinema. Beneath the three of them, the bench is unusually deep — Tovino Thomas, Soubin Shahir, Asif Ali, Kunchacko Boban, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Vinay Forrt, Jagadish, the late Nedumudi Venu and the late Innocent. On the women's side, the slower industrial story — the WCC's formation in 2017 and the long fight over the 2024-published Hema Committee report has documented the industry's structural hostility to its women — has nonetheless produced Manju Warrier, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Anna Ben, Darshana Rajendran, Mamitha Baiju and Aishwarya Lekshmi as the working centre of the contemporary acting field.

06Consolidation and slump (1990s to 2000s)

The 1990s consolidated the Mohanlal-Mammootty axis. Mohanlal's run through Bharatham (1991), Devasuram (1993), Manichitrathazhu (1993) and Vanaprastham (1999) gave him a register that stretched from village patriarch to dissociative-personality study to classical kathakali artist; Mammootty's Mathilukal (1990), Vidheyan (1994), Ponthan Mada (1994) and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000) anchored him in the prestige register. Priyadarshan's commercial dominance through Kilukkam (1991), Thenmavin Kombath (1994) and Kaalapani (1996), and Sibi Malayil's continued Lohithadas partnership, kept the engine running even as satellite television began to splinter the daily audience. By the middle of the 1990s, however, the late-Mohanlal vehicles scripted by Ranjith and directed by Shaji Kailas — the Aaraam Thampuran-Narasimham strain — had begun to displace the Lohithadas tragedies as the dominant register, and the film-society critics started writing openly about an industry losing its restraint.

The 2000s brought a long creative slump that lasted nearly a full decade. As satellite fragmented audiences and Tamil and Telugu cinema scaled up around them, Malayalam producers retreated into low-budget star vehicles that cycled through diminishing returns. The pivot films of the period — Lal Jose's Meesa Madhavan (2002) and Classmates (2006), Blessy's debut Kaazhcha (2004) and Thanmathra (2005), Roshan Andrews's Udayananu Tharam (2005) and Notebook (2006), Ranjith's writer-director shift through Nandanam (2002) and Paleri Manikyam (2009), Major Ravi's military films — kept the decade alive without quite resetting it. Reading the slump back from now, what looks most consequential is that the producers who survived it learned to make films at lower cost with smaller stars, which is precisely the production grammar the New Generation broke through with.

As satellite fragmented audiences and Tamil and Telugu cinema scaled up around them, Malayalam producers retreated into low-budget star vehicles that cycled through diminishing returns.

07The New Generation movement (2010 to 2019)

The reset arrived in early 2011 with three films that opened within months of each other: Aashiq Abu's Salt N' Pepper, Rajesh Pillai's Traffic and Sameer Thahir's Chappa Kurishu. None looked like a manifesto, all three were. They used contemporary visual grammar, ensemble writing, urban locations and a casual present-tense register that the slump-era star vehicle had refused. Anwar Rasheed's Ustad Hotel (2012), written by Anjali Menon, brought the sentiment of the middle film back at multiplex scale. Anjali Menon's own Bangalore Days (2014) opened the female-led ensemble register. Lijo Jose Pellissery, after working through City of God (2011) and Amen (2013), produced the auteur breakthrough: Angamaly Diaries (2017), with eighty-six debut actors and the now-canonical eleven-minute climactic single take through a chaotic pork-shop celebration; Ee.Ma.Yau (2018), the tragicomic Christian funeral; and Jallikattu (2019), the buffalo-hunt film whose handheld pursuit-camera and torch-lit second half were India's submission to the 92nd Academy Awards.

Dileesh Pothan's Maheshinte Prathikaaram (2016) and Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum (2017), both written by Syam Pushkaran and starring Fahadh Faasil, set the period's performance and writing benchmark. The image at the centre of Maheshinte — the chappal-fight scene where the studio photographer Mahesh resolves not to wear footwear until he has avenged his street humiliation — is the Lijo-Pothan generation's equivalent of the Padmarajan rain-window scene from Thoovanathumbikal: an emotional contract carried entirely through ordinary objects. Mahesh Narayanan's Take Off (2017), drawn from the 2014 evacuation of Indian nurses from Tikrit, brought a procedural-realism discipline to the mainstream that critics drew comparison with Paul Greengrass and Asghar Farhadi. Geethu Mohandas's Liar's Dice (2013) and Moothon (2019), Rajeev Ravi's Annayum Rasoolum (2013) and Kammatipaadam (2016, the Dalit-history film whose violence the canon is still arguing about), Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's Sexy Durga (2017, Hivos Tiger Award at Rotterdam) and Madhu C. Narayanan's Kumbalangi Nights (2019, the brothers'-table dinner scene as a small textbook in ensemble blocking) extended the wave across registers. Fahadh Faasil emerged as the actor who could carry the entire generation.

08The 2020s: streaming, the second wind, the Hema reckoning

The pandemic accelerated Malayalam cinema's streaming pivot. Mahesh Narayanan's C U Soon (2020), shot on phones during lockdown and assembled remotely, was one of the earliest credible India-made screenlife films. 2021 produced an extraordinary cluster: Jeo Baby's The Great Indian Kitchen, released first on the small Kerala platform Neestream and built as a feminist procedural — its long sink-and-stove sequences are the closest Malayalam cinema has come to a Chantal Akerman discipline; Dileesh Pothan's Joji, Pushkaran's Macbeth on a central-Kerala rubber plantation; Mahesh Narayanan's Malik; and Basil Joseph's Minnal Murali, the Netflix-released superhero film built around Tovino Thomas. Drishyam 2 (2021) became the high-profile OTT-premiere blockbuster.

2024 confirmed Malayalam cinema as the country's surprise commercial story. Chidambaram's Manjummel Boys (₹240 crore-plus worldwide on a ~₹20 crore budget, more than half its revenue from outside Kerala), Girish A.D.'s Premalu, Jithu Madhavan's Aavesham (Fahadh Faasil as a Bangalore-Malayali gangster, the registers of mass and minimalism running side by side), and Rahul Sadasivan's monochrome Bramayugam each crossed over to non-Malayalam audiences via dubbing and streaming. Anand Ekarshi's single-set Aattam (2023) won Best Feature Film at the 70th National Awards. Letterboxd's Top 25 of 2024 carried five Malayalam titles, more than any other Indian-language industry. Underneath the commercial story, the industry has been working through the long-delayed reckoning of the Justice Hema Committee report, commissioned in 2017 after the 2017 Kochi assault case and the WCC's formation, completed in 2019, and finally published in redacted form in August 2024 — a document the industry, its producers and its older male stars have not yet finished reading honestly.

09Music and sound: from Devarajan to Sushin Shyam

Malayalam film music has its own continuous tradition, distinct from but in constant conversation with the Tamil playback world. The early decades belonged to G. Devarajan, M.S. Baburaj, V. Dakshinamoorthy and the singer K.J. Yesudas, whose voice has now defined Malayalam film song for nearly six decades. The 1980s and 1990s middle-cinema era was scored largely by Johnson Master, Raveendran and Ouseppachan. Johnson's work for Bharathan and Sibi Malayil — the unscored silences in Bharatham (1991) are as important as anything he wrote — earned him the National Film Award for Best Music Direction twice, and his emotional minimalism remains the era's most-imitated signature. Raveendran's classically-trained melodies for His Highness Abdullah (1990) and Bharatham, Ouseppachan's romantic textures across the period, and Vidyasagar's pop-classicism through the 2000s extended the tradition. M. Jayachandran's classical-leaning scores have continued to anchor the prestige films.

The contemporary sound was built by a younger group with a noticeably different ear: Bijibal (Maheshinte Prathikaaram, 2016), Rex Vijayan (Kammatipaadam, 2016; Mayaanadhi, 2017 — the indie-rock register Avial had brought into Malayalam pop translated into score), Prashant Pillai, Govind Vasantha (working across Malayalam and Tamil) and most prominently Sushin Shyam. Sushin's run from Kumbalangi Nights (2019) through Bheeshma Parvam (2022), Bramayugam (2024) and Manjummel Boys (2024) — the last of which used the 1980 Tamil song Kanmani Anbodu Kadhalan from Guna as its emotional centre — has made him the first Malayalam composer since A.R. Rahman's early Tamil years whose work has crossed into the wider South Indian film consciousness on its own terms. Production sound and design have similarly matured: Resul Pookutty's editorial-sound generation has been followed by Renganaath Ravee, M.R. Rajakrishnan and the now near-canonical sound design of Jallikattu and Bramayugam.

Rahman's early Tamil years whose work has crossed into the wider South Indian film consciousness on its own terms.

10Production, the producer model, and the OTT economics

The unique industrial fact about Malayalam cinema is that its producers learned, through the long 2000s slump, to make films at scale-appropriate budgets. The contemporary banners — Aashiq Abu's OPM Cinemas, Anwar Rasheed Entertainment, Wayfarer Films (the Prithviraj-led house that backed Lucifer 2019 and Empuraan 2025), Fahadh Faasil and Friends (the producer-actor model that put out Kumbalangi Nights and Joji), Working Class Hero (the Jithu Madhavan-Aavesham producer-comedy banner), and Mammootty Kampany (founded 2022, the late-career production model that has put Mammootty at the centre of Lijo, Sadasivan and Jeo Baby's most adventurous work) — operate on a logic that distributors like KFPA and individual exhibitors have built around. A film made for ₹3 to ₹15 crore with an established writer, a credible director and one of the working bench actors can recover its negative cost through the satellite-and-streaming pre-sale alone, before opening theatrically. That risk-shifted economics is why the industry can keep funding writer-driven mid-budget work that the larger Indian industries no longer find profitable.

The Lijo-Unni R. collaboration model, the Pothan-Pushkaran-Fahadh combinations, and the Mammootty Kampany model of the older star producing for younger directors are all variations on the same insight: the Malayalam mid-budget film is the actual economic unit of the industry, and the rest of the system can be organised around protecting its margins. This is the structural reason Manjummel Boys could happen. It was not a freak event.

11Where to start

A first-time viewer can use a small set of films as anchors. Elippathayam (1981) and Mathilukal (1990) for Adoor Gopalakrishnan and the parallel canon. Chidambaram (1985) for Aravindan and the lyric register. Yavanika (1982) for K.G. George. Thoovanathumbikal (1987) for Padmarajan and the middle-cinema rain. Bharatham (1991) for the Sibi Malayil-Lohithadas-Mohanlal combination. Vidheyan (1994) and Peranbu (2018) for Mammootty's prestige peaks. Maheshinte Prathikaaram (2016) and Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum (2017) for Dileesh Pothan and the New Generation register. Jallikattu (2019) for Lijo Jose Pellissery's auteur sensibility. Kumbalangi Nights (2019) for the ensemble grammar of the present. The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) for the politically argumentative strand. Kaathal – The Core (2023) for the late-Mammootty risk. Manjummel Boys (2024) for the streaming-era mainstream. Bramayugam (2024) for the late-career genre adventurism. From those fifteen films, every other strand of Malayalam cinema is one or two titles away.