Aattam: A masterclass in misdirection, Anand Ekarshi’s anti-whodunnit is an early contender for the movie of the year

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This actor continues working in the Malayalam film industry, although, in a welcome turn of events, audiences seem to have turned their backs on him. But Aattam doesn’t merely paint the abuser as the villain. The movie approaches its tricky subject with a spare-no-one attitude that instantly sets it apart from a sea of feminist films directed by poseurs and opportunists. Many of these pretenders find representation in members of Aattam’s theatre troupe, which includes virtue signallers, outright dinosaurs, and everyone in between.

One uncle points out that the woman, a promising young actor called Anjali, was drunk out of her mind that evening. “Men can’t be trusted when they’re drunk,” he says, implying that Anjali is somehow responsible for what happened to her. The others recoil in horror at his suggestion. “We don’t agree with his views,” says another uncle, the de-facto leader of the group by virtue of being its oldest member. It’s at his house that everybody else, excluding Anjali and the accused actor Hari, congregates over some tea and biriyani to dissect the case like the 12 Angry Men.

But even though they spend close to two hours deliberating over the matter, Aattam ultimately isn’t a whodunnit at all. The entire premise of the movie is a red herring. Like Pink, which devoted all its energies into a narrative about proving whether the survivors at its centre were sex workers, Aattam performs a grand misdirection by leading us to believe that it’s principally a story about finding evidence against Hari. In their hurry to do the right thing and pat themselves on the back, the men don’t realise that they’re essentially speaking on behalf of, and making decisions for Anjali, who pointedly wasn’t even invited, or even consulted.

The men arrive at a consensus rather quickly. It is decided that Hari will be expelled from the troupe without any further ado. That wasn’t so difficult after all, was it? But it is at this stage in the narrative that Aattam introduces the first of its many moral twists. A clueless Hari drops by unannounced to declare that he has struck a deal with some white people to fly the troupe out to Europe for a series of performances over three months. All expenses paid. This changes the power dynamics instantly. With money and a foreign trip on the table, must Hari — the facilitator of these fancy perks — be thrown out at all?

It exposes the men for who they really are — greedy, insecure, selfish, uncaring, pretentious nobodies perfectly willing to throw Anjali, ostensibly their friend, under the bus. “This troupe was my safe space,” she says tragically in one scene, letting everybody know that she has been let down. But after a point, it seems like they’re actively looking for reasons to doubt her, or, more precisely, to gaslight her into thinking that nothing happened in the first place. One character furnishes ‘proof’ to suggest that Hari was asleep in his room at the time that the assault took place. His argument stems from his inherent disinterest in believing her, and not from any sort of desire to protect Hari. Another character declares that Anjali has been in a secret relationship with a member of the group, Vinay. This shouldn’t change the fact that she was assaulted, but the men use this information as an excuse to accuse her and Vinay of conspiring together to have Hari expelled.

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Aattam makes the rather disheartening suggestion that in order to be believed, women must embellish the truth with lies, as if the actual truth weren’t enough. Even though she was assaulted, Anjali goes ahead with the untruth that she approached the de-facto leader of the troupe with the allegations first and not Vinay, whose professional rivalry against Hari might colour the narrative. Vinay, by the way, is the sort of ‘ally’ that a movie like Satyaprem Ki Katha would valorise without a second thought. But in Ekarshi’s able hands, he is just as culpable as the rest of them. And that is the film’s final statement, delivered in typically unambiguous terms — complicity is a crime. The identity of the assailant is irrelevant. They’re all guilty. As Elie Wiesel once said, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”