Jeethu Joseph: The director who proved that a strong script can make audiences overlook even a film’s most obvious flaws

Although he could easily embrace it and live off Drishyam’s legacy forever, Jeethu has repeatedly demonstrated that this is not his aspiration. While even his thrillers that aren’t part of the franchise illustrates this, he has tried to make the same point with his efforts in other genres too. However, what holds him back is his shortcomings as a director, as he has yet to master the visual language. In other words, had Jeethu been even half as strong a director as he is a screenwriter, he might have been able to break free from the tyranny of his masterpiece by now.

Since the beginning of his career, Jeethu Joseph has shown that he isn’t interested in chaining himself to either his success or a particular genre. Despite Detective turning out to be a moderate success and offers coming his way to create something similar, he chose to make a diametrically different film next — Mummy & Me — a family drama starring Urvashi and Archana Jose Kavi in the lead roles. Interestingly, Jeethu once shared that his friends warned him against making a movie headlined by a woman. “They told me it was woman-oriented and that it wouldn’t work, but I went ahead anyway. Detective was easy compared to the struggle I had to go through for Mummy & Me. But I wanted to do a different film,” he told The Hindu in 2014, adding that this was why he went ahead with it despite having the one-liner for Memories also ready.

Jeethu Joseph is gearing up for the release of his 19th directorial venture, Mirage, a thriller starring Asif Ali and Aparna Balamurali. (Credit: Facebook/@JeethuJosephOnline)

Jeethu’s decision to follow his heart paid off once again, as Mummy & Me emerged a hit. In contrast to Detective, where he focused entirely on maintaining suspense — utilising the Rashomon effect as well and crafting a unique modus operandi for the murder in focus — but missed creating an impactful emotional core, Mummy & Me was the exact opposite. Here, he did not concern himself with logic or making the screenplay watertight. Instead, he aimed to craft only moments that were as emotionally resonant as possible. Considering this was also an era when Malayalam cinema was at its worst, with the industry producing nothing substantial or worthwhile, the film impressed audiences, thanks in large part to Urvashi’s stellar performance.

Even though Detective and Mummy & Me were polar opposite movies, there was one similarity between them: the lack of finesse in direction. Had Jeethu’s script faltered even a bit, both films would have crumbled completely, as they lacked visual aesthetics otherwise and appeared soap opera-ish. In his journey forward, Jeethu showed this well. Whenever his writing fell short, his movies collapsed entirely, not even getting a breather due to the substandard quality of direction. In other words, had Jeethu’s screenwriting been less impressive or just average, with no standout scripts to his credit, it’s doubtful he would have managed to survive in the Malayalam industry so effortlessly for so long.

Jeethu Joseph with Mohanlal on the sets of Neru. (Credit: Facebook/@JeethuJosephOnline)

Nonetheless, Jeethu Joseph’s brilliance and mastery lie in his ability to enchant audiences so much that they don’t even notice his filmmaking limitations, or, better yet, not care about them at all, as he has already captured their undivided attention. He managed to achieve this even in the romantic comedy My Boss (2012), an adaptation of Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock’s The Proposal (2009). Here, he did not simply remake the Hollywood movie. Instead, he carefully rooted it in the local grounds, packed it with hilarious one-liners, and ensured uproarious dynamics between various characters. A closer look at the movie’s unrefined camera angles and editing patterns, nevertheless, reveals Jeethu’s lack of a firm grasp on filmmaking. But none of that stopped him from impressing the audience and turning My Boss into one of the few recent movies with high rewatch value.

Writer-director Jeethu Joseph with Kamal Haasan on the sets of Papanasam. (Credit: Facebook/@JeethuJosephOnline)

If there’s one movie in his career where Jeethu demonstrated jaw-dropping directorial skills, it’s in the Prithviraj Sukumaran-starrer Memories (2013), where even the camera movement and colour garding radiated excellence. However, this raises a question: how did he achieve this level of craft only once; neither before nor after? From Drishyam, Kamal Haasan’s Papanasam, Life of Josutty (2015), Oozham (2016) and Aadhi (2018) to Thambi (2019), Drishyam 2, 12th Man (2022), Kooman (2022), Neru (2023) and Nunakkuzhi (2024), he never managed to create a visual world that transcended what he had already written on paper in any of these movies. Simply put, not even once — before or after Memories — did he manage to uplift his scripts further using his directorial skills, or capture or express more than what he already had on paper through his frames. Even the cuts in his scenes, except in predominantly high-octane actioners like Oozham and Aadhi, often feel like punctuation marks in his scripts; functional, but rarely offering a spellbinding experience. Although his Hindi directorial The Body (2019) was technically better compared to his other works, it was totally forgettable remake of the 2012 Spanish original of the same name.

Writer-director Jeethu Joseph with Prithviraj Sukumaran on the sets of Memories. (Credit: Facebook/@JeethuJosephOnline)

In a recent interview with Galatta Plus, Jeethu Joseph shared that he prefers audiences to discuss the quality of his films and whether they liked them, rather than how much money they made. “A movie should be talked about based on its quality, the performances and such aspects. But nowadays, everyone is talking about box office collections. I’m not happy with that. All that I want to hear is people say ‘it’s a good movie’, and the producer say, ‘I didn’t lose my money’. If the movie makes anything above (the budget), I’m happy. But my priority is that the producer doesn’t lose money,” he stated.

One of the major drawbacks of such a mindset is the un/conscious tendency to play to the gallery. Although Jeethu has maintained a sense of variety in his movies, with each of his thrillers (excluding remakes of his own films) being distinct from his other films in the same genre, his stories predominantly carry a patriarchal mindset and gaze. He often taps into the trope of fridging, frequently using crimes against women as narrative devices and then reducing female characters to “victims.” From his very first film onwards, this pattern has appeared in most of Jeethu’s scripts, with women suffering some form of crime — often assault or rape — either because they were “morally wrong” or otherwise. Regardless of where they fall on the moral spectrum, Jeethu’s female characters have invariably been wronged.

Jeethu Joseph with Asif Ali on the sets of Kooman. (Credit: Facebook/@JeethuJosephOnline)

Be it Reshmi (Sindhu Menon) in Detective, Teena (Meghana Raj) in Memories, Anju (Ansiba Hassan) in the Drishyam movies, Shiny (Anusree) in 12th Man, or Sara Mohammed (Anaswara Rajan) in Neru; this trend persisted. The only somewhat notable exceptions were Oozham, Thambi, and Aadhi, where the women were more than just victims. However, here too, the director seldom gave them as much development as he offered the men. In Kooman, on the other hand, Jeethu introduced a queer character near the climax, turning what was previously a somewhat engaging narrative into a problematic affair. His overt attempts to deliver jarring climactic twists like this have also backfired more than once. This tendency can be a result of his obsession with ensuring that the producer doesn’t lose money, which un/knowingly prompts him to produce formulaic movies, instead of unique ones that capture widespread attention and thus mint good money.

Amid all these issues, Jeethu Joseph’s films — particularly his non-thrillers like My Boss, Life of Josutty, and Nunakkuzhi — show that his writing possesses a quality of likability. Just as he can create a chaotic world and a slew of equally chaotic characters in Nunakkuzhi, he can also craft something impressively slice-of-life like Life of Josutty. His works indeed demonstrate an excellent script’s ability to help viewers overlook the movie’s evident and abundant flaws. As he gears up for Mirage, let’s hope Jeethu hasn’t fridged any more women, hasn’t forced in any climactic twists, and has grown as a director.

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