Malayalam Cinema in the 2020s

01The pandemic pivot and the 2021 cluster

The first phase of the decade was shaped by the pandemic. Mahesh Narayanan's C U Soon (2020), shot entirely on phones during the first lockdown and assembled across remote workflows by the editor-turned-director who had spent the 2000s cutting other people's films, became one of the earliest credible India-made screenlife thrillers and went directly to Amazon Prime Video. Through 2020 and early 2021 theatrical releases were largely paused; Malayalam producers turned to streaming earlier and more aggressively than their counterparts in Tamil, Telugu or Hindi, in part because Malayalam mid-budget economics were better suited to direct-to-platform release than to the multiplex grids the larger industries were built around.

2021 produced an extraordinary cluster. Jeo Baby's The Great Indian Kitchen, released on the small Kerala platform Neestream on 15 January 2021 before going to Amazon Prime, became a critical and political event for its argument about gendered domestic labour. The film's long sink-and-stove sequences — the unending cycle of breakfast preparation, dishes, tea, more dishes — are the closest Malayalam cinema has come to the procedural patience of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, and the writer-director's refusal to let the husband or father-in-law function as villains in a conventional sense is what made the film operate as social diagnosis rather than melodrama. Dileesh Pothan's Joji, written by Syam Pushkaran and starring Fahadh Faasil in the title role, transposed Macbeth onto a Christian rubber-plantation family in central Kerala, with Baburaj as the older brother whose physical violence the film never permits the audience to recover from. Mahesh Narayanan's Malik, also with Fahadh Faasil, brought a longer-form historical-political register set against the 2009 Beemapally police firing. Basil Joseph's Minnal Murali, released worldwide on Netflix on 24 December 2021 with Tovino Thomas as a tailor-turned-superhero in the Idukki village of Kurukkanmoola, became Malayalam's first credible homegrown superhero film and the platform's first major Malayalam original.

02Mammootty Kampany and the second wind

Mammootty's late-career second wind, organised through Mammootty Kampany — founded in 2022 with his son Dulquer Salmaan among the early backers — is one of the decade's defining structural facts. The company's mandate, as the producer-actor has described in interviews on OnManorama and Mathrubhumi English, has been to back younger directors making films that the older star economy would not have funded. Lijo Jose Pellissery's Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (2023) — the film in which Mammootty's character, a Kerala tour-bus passenger, sleeps through a midday afternoon and wakes up speaking Tamil and behaving as a missing Tamil Nadu farmer named Sundaram, the entire third act played in Tamil with no formal explanation offered — is one of the most formally adventurous performances any senior Indian actor has given since the 1990s. Jeo Baby's Kaathal – The Core (2023), in which Mammootty plays Mathew Devassy, a closeted gay panchayat election candidate whose wife Omana (Jyothika) files for divorce, was the most adventurous role of the actor's career and won wide critical praise inside India and at international festivals. Roby Varghese Raj's Kannur Squad (2023), a more straightforward crime procedural drawn from the actual Kerala Police investigation unit, grossed over ₹100 crore. Rahul Sadasivan's Bramayugam (2024), shot entirely in 1.40:1 black-and-white and set in seventeenth-century Kerala under a Yakshi-haunted house, was a horror film whose Mammootty performance — Kodumon Potti, a feudal landlord whose menace registers almost entirely through his eye-line and his stillness — became the year's most-discussed turn.

The combined effect of the Mammootty Kampany run is that the older of the two stars who anchored the 1990s Malayalam middle cinema has, in his early seventies, become the industry's most adventurous senior actor. The reading critics like Anna M.M. Vetticad have offered is that Mammootty has used the producer position to do what no working older Indian male star has done at scale — actively underwrite films whose subject matter the older star economy would actively avoid. Whether Mohanlal's parallel late-career production work — Lucifer (2019, directed by Prithviraj), Empuraan (2025), his own director credit on Barroz (2024) — operates with comparable risk-tolerance is the open critical argument of the decade.

03The 2024 breakout: Manjummel Boys, Premalu, Aavesham, Bramayugam

2024 was the year Malayalam cinema confirmed its disproportionate national footprint. Chidambaram's Manjummel Boys, released on 22 February 2024, was a survival drama based on a 2006 incident in which a group of friends from the Manjummel area of Ernakulam rescued one of their own from a fall into the Devil's Kitchen at the Guna Caves at Kodaikanal. The film grossed over ₹240 crore worldwide on a budget of around ₹20 crore, becoming the highest-grossing Malayalam film of all time at the point of its release. Crucially, more than half its revenue came from outside Kerala, and the Tamil Nadu theatrical run was supported partly by the film's deliberate use of the 1991 Tamil song Kanmani Anbodu Kadhalan from the Mani Ratnam-Kamal Haasan film Guna — a needle-drop choice that critics including Baradwaj Rangan flagged as the year's most precise emotional cue.

Girish A.D.'s Premalu, released on 9 February 2024 with Naslen and Mamitha Baiju, became a streaming and dubbed-version phenomenon across India. Jithu Madhavan's Aavesham, released in April with Fahadh Faasil playing a Bangalore-based Malayali gangster Rangan, repeated the multilingual streaming pattern; the Sajin Gopu supporting performance as Amban was the breakout secondary role of the year. Rahul Sadasivan's Bramayugam, released earlier in February, took the prestige half of the same audience. Letterboxd's Top 25 films of 2024 ranking included five Malayalam titles — Bramayugam, Manjummel Boys, Aattam, Aavesham and Premalu — more than any other Indian-language industry that year, and more than the Hindi industry's combined total. The structural reading, as Film Companion South's Anupama Chopra and the Variety international team have both noted, is not that 2024 was a freak year. It is that the Malayalam producer model — mid-budget, writer-driven, recoverable through OTT pre-sales before theatrical release — was finally meeting an Indian audience prepared to pay attention to subtitled and dubbed work.

Girish A.D.'s Premalu, released on 9 February 2024 with Naslen and Mamitha Baiju, became a streaming and dubbed-version phenomenon across India.

04Anand Ekarshi, Aattam and the festival thread

Alongside the commercial breakout, the festival thread of the decade has been led by directors working at smaller scale. Anand Ekarshi's Aattam (2023), a single-set chamber drama about a theatre troupe forced over a single night to investigate an allegation of sexual assault by one of its male actors against the company's only woman, won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film at the 70th National Awards in 2024 — the highest national prize Malayalam cinema has won in the decade. Read against the Hema Committee's August 2024 publication, the film operates as a dramatised interior of exactly the procedural and political pressures the report's testimonies describe. Lijo Jose Pellissery's Churuli (2021) and Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (2023) extended his auteur run; Don Palathara's quiet, austere features through Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam (2021) and Family (2023) anchored the more experimental end of the field.

Blessy's Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life (2024), based on Benyamin's 2008 novel about a Malayali migrant Najeeb (Prithviraj Sukumaran) trapped as a goatherd in the Saudi Arabian desert, was made over fifteen years and became one of the most commercially ambitious Malayalam films ever attempted. Sanu John Varghese's Ariyippu (2022), starring Kunchacko Boban and Divya Prabha as a migrant Kerala couple working in a Delhi glove factory whose lives are upended by a leaked video, won the Best Director prize at the Locarno Film Festival. The festival circuit's continued attention to mid-scale Malayalam work — at Locarno, Rotterdam, Busan and the IFFK itself — means the auteur thread of the decade is operating in dialogue with, not in opposition to, the commercial breakout.

05Music: Sushin Shyam's defining run

Sushin Shyam has been the defining film composer of the Malayalam 2020s, and 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. His scores for Kumbalangi Nights (2019, just outside the decade) carried directly into Bheeshma Parvam (2022) — whose Parudeesa song became the first Malayalam track to consistently chart on Spotify India's overall daily lists — Jana Gana Mana (2022), Bramayugam (2024) and Manjummel Boys (2024). The Manjummel Boys soundtrack, built around the licensed re-use of Ilaiyaraaja's 1980 Kanmani Anbodu Kadhalan from Guna and a kinetic original score, became one of the year's most-streamed film albums across Indian languages. Sushin's importance is structural: the writer-director generation that built around him in the late 2010s now writes screenplays with his sonic palette in mind, the way the 1990s Sibi Malayil-Lohithadas films had been written assuming Johnson Master would score them.

In parallel, Justin Varghese (Kaathal – The Core, 2023; Joji, 2021), Govind Vasantha (working across Malayalam and Tamil), Bijibal, Rex Vijayan and the older M. Jayachandran and Vidyasagar continue to score. The producer P.S. Jayhari has emerged as a quieter senior figure. The eclectic, indie-influenced sound that arrived in the late 2010s has now become the default register; the older orchestral idiom survives mainly in prestige and devotional projects. The continuity from Devarajan and Yesudas to Sushin remains unbroken — each generation of Malayalam composer has scored at least one film the next generation has openly cited as a starting point.

06The new acting generation and the older stars

The 2020s have produced a distinct new acting generation that the New Generation directors of the 2010s have built around. Naslen, who broke through with Vineeth Sreenivasan's Thanneer Mathan Dinangal (2019) and consolidated with Premalu (2024) and Alappuzha Gymkhana (2025), has become the defining new male lead. Mamitha Baiju, opposite him in Premalu, and Anaswara Rajan, Anna Ben (Kumbalangi Nights, 2019; Helen, 2019), Darshana Rajendran (Hridayam, 2022; Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, 2022) and Aishwarya Lekshmi anchor the new female lead bench. Sajin Gopu's breakout supporting performance in Aavesham (2024) and Sandeep Pradeep's run through Manjummel Boys, Premalu and Aavesham follow the same pattern of mid-twenties actors building their careers across consecutive overlapping productions.

The older stars have continued to anchor major projects in parallel. Mohanlal's Lucifer (2019, directed by Prithviraj just outside the decade), Drishyam 2 (2021) — the OTT-premiered direct sequel that became one of Amazon Prime Video's most-watched Indian originals — Malaikottai Vaaliban (2024) under Lijo Jose Pellissery, the disastrous Barroz (2024) Mohanlal himself directed, and the Empuraan (2025) sequel he carried back into the lead-and-producer role have run alongside Mammootty's Mammootty Kampany reinvention. Prithviraj Sukumaran has carried both his lead acting career — Aadujeevitham (2024) chief among them — and a successful direction-and-production run with Lucifer (2019) and Empuraan (2025) under Wayfarer Films. Dulquer Salmaan, who began his career under Anwar Rasheed in the previous decade, has worked across Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi, becoming the most consistently pan-Indian Malayali actor of his generation.

Prithviraj Sukumaran has carried both his lead acting career — Aadujeevitham (2024) chief among them — and a successful direction-and-production run with Lucifer (2019) and Empuraan (2025) under Wayfarer Films.

07The Hema Committee, the WCC and the cultural moment

The single most important non-cinematic event of the decade is the August 2024 publication, in redacted form, of the report of the Justice K. Hema Committee. The committee was constituted by the Government of Kerala in 2017 in response to the February 2017 Kochi assault case in which a senior Malayalam female actor was abducted and assaulted, and in which the actor and producer Dileep was eventually arrested. The Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), founded later that year by Manju Warrier, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Rima Kallingal, Anjali Menon, Geethu Mohandas and others, was the organising vehicle that pushed for the committee's creation. The committee submitted its report to the state government in December 2019; it was withheld from publication for nearly five years on grounds of complainant confidentiality. The August 2024 release, mediated through extensive Right to Information litigation and reporting by The News Minute, OnManorama and The Hindu, made public a redacted version that nonetheless contained named-and-unnamed accounts of casting-couch coercion, contract violation, surveillance, harassment and the existence of a producer-actor power group within the industry that was using its leverage to silence women's complaints.

The direct industry consequences in late 2024 and early 2025 included the resignation of Ranjith as chairman of the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy in August 2024, the resignation of the actor Siddique from his executive position in the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes (AMMA), criminal cases registered against several named senior figures, and a wider critical reassessment in Mathrubhumi, Madhyamam and Onmanorama columns of how the canon had been protecting its own. The cultural moment Malayalam cinema is currently working through is, in effect, the collision between a commercial breakout it has spent thirty years building toward and a reckoning the same industry had spent seven years actively delaying. Honest critics — Anna M.M. Vetticad, Sangeetha Devi, the WCC writers themselves — have argued that the two facts have to be carried together, and that the true 2020s test is whether the producing infrastructure that made Manjummel Boys possible can also make a working culture that the 2017 Kochi case would no longer be possible inside.

08Streaming, the international conversation, and what comes next

By the middle of the decade, Malayalam cinema's relationship with the international streaming platforms had become one of the industry's defining structural features. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, SonyLIV, Disney+ Hotstar, JioHotstar and the Kerala-specific Manorama Max have all built dedicated Malayalam slates; films that cost ₹5 to ₹15 crore to produce routinely earn back their negative cost through platform deals and satellite pre-sales before opening in theatres, which has shifted the producer-side risk calculation in a way the larger Indian industries have not yet matched. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have both, since 2024, run multiple long features specifically tracking the Malayalam mid-budget producer model as something the international market is studying for transferability.

The BAFTA, Spirit Award and Cannes ACID-section conversation around several Malayalam titles, the for-your-consideration campaigns mounted for The Great Indian Kitchen and the 2024 cluster, and the steady IFFK and IFFR programming reflect a wider international curiosity the industry has not enjoyed since Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Cannes era. Whether the 2024 commercial breakout settles into a new normal or proves to have been a peak year is the open question the rest of the decade will answer. What is already clear, by 2026, is that Malayalam cinema operates at a scale and reach the home market alone could never have produced — its mid-budget actor-and-script films travel further on streaming than equivalents from any other Indian-language industry, and the producing infrastructure built over the previous fifteen years now functions as the country's most reliable engine for writer-driven cinema.