Post Credits Scene: When was the last time that a movie's entire premise was revealed to be a red herring? In his astonishing Malayalam drama Aattam, out now on Prime Video, director Anand Ekarshi performs a memorable act of misdirection.
Offering self-reflective meta-commentary on not just the film industry's handling of the #MeToo movement, but also pointing fingers at everybody who played an accessory to the crimes, director Anand Ekarshi's Aattam (The Play) is a searing portrait of social injustice. The film recently debuted on Prime Video after a celebrated festival run last year. And in its own way — populist, propulsive, and thoroughly entertaining — Aattam might just be the best Indian film of its kind since Pink all those years ago, and an early contender for one of the best movies of the year.
Ekarshi performs a particularly deft sleight of hand, setting up a locked-room mystery of sorts, before revealing Aattam to be a far more ambitious project than he'd initially let on. When the sole female member of a theatre troupe is sexually assaulted by the male ‘hero' at a farmhouse retreat one evening, the other male members congregate like the College of Cardinals to decide how they should proceed. It is perhaps no coincidence that the accused — a middle-aged, mustachioed, pot-bellied actor prone to pomposity — looks an awful lot like a real-life Malayalam movie star charged with similar crimes.
