Is Mammootty’s Kaalamkaval A Story About Cyanide Mohan?
Mammootty’s latest film, Kalamkaval, a psychological-police thriller directed by Jithin K Jose and produced by Mammootty Kampany, has drawn attention not just for its star power and storytelling finesse, but also for a growing public curiosity: is it inspired by the notorious serial killer from South India known as Cyanide Mohan?
The resemblance between the film’s antagonist and the real-life murderer from Karnataka is hard to ignore, yet key differences place the film firmly in the realm of creative interpretation rather than a direct biographical account. Kalamkaval is currently running on theatres successfully after earning both critical and box office acclaim.
In Kalamkaval, Mammootty plays Stanley Das, a mysterious and morally ambiguous man whose occupation remains deliberately obscured for most of the narrative or till the first half. (In this article) Revealing his profession would spoil an integral twist, an element crucial to the film’s slow-burning tension.
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This creative choice immediately distances Kalamkaval from the actual case of Mohan Kumar, the schoolteacher-turned-serial killer who preyed, methodically and fatally, on women across Karnataka’s coastal belt and northern Kerala.
Mohan Kumar, infamously nicknamed Cyanide Mohan, was a physical education teacher in Mangalore who confessed to killing at least 19 women between 2003 and 2009.
His victims were mostly young, unmarried women, who are either poor or facing uncertainty over the prospects of a marriage due various socioeconomic reasons, lured with promises of marriage.
He would convince them to spend the night with him, and later give them what he claimed were contraceptive pills, laced instead with cyanide. Most of the murders occurred in public toilets, the criminal mind of Mohan chosen to reduce suspicion and make disposal inconspicuous. When police arrested him in 2009, they found cyanide tablets, jewellery, and multiple mobile phones linked to the victims. Mohan was sentenced to death in 2013, later commuted to life imprisonment.
The echoes of this modus operandi are visible in Kalamkaval, which takes the audience to another level of movie experience with Mammootty’s performance and the power of story telling. Stanley Das, like Mohan, deceives women emotionally, develops intimate relations, and ultimately kills them.
The behavioural parallels— calculated charm, calm duplicity, and a chilling detachment — mirror those of real-world psychopaths. However, unlike Mohan, Mammootty’s character is not driven by financial gain.
The film never portrays him stealing from his victims, and he lacks the fraudulent streak that defined Mohan’s post-crime activity. Reports from the 2010s revealed that Mohan fabricated documents with fake rubber seals to secure loans and defrauded banks and fellow teachers, many of whom ended up repaying his dues.
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While Mohan’s operations were spread across northern Kerala and coastal Karnataka, Kalamkaval has its setting to southern Tamil Nadu and parts of southern Kerala. As Mammootty’s character says in the movie, he was born and brought up in the border areas of Tamil Nadu. And Mammootty perfects his language dictions here in this movie as well.
Importantly, Kalamkaval departs from the real-life case in how it treats closure. Mohan was eventually caught and convicted, but the film leaves the fate of Stanley Das unresolved.
Viewers never see what happens to Stanly Das, reflecting the director’s choice to leave open the possibilities of the end of a criminal whom everyone wants the harshest of ends. The ambiguity amplifies the film’s tension and invites interpretation rather than judgement.
This blend of fiction and real-life resonance mirrors what Hindi audiences saw in the 2023 series Dahaad, directed by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti.
That Amazon Prime series starred Vijay Varma as Anand Swarnakar, a college lecturer with unsettling similarities to Cyanide Mohan. Like the Karnataka killer, Varma’s character targeted unsuspecting women under the guise of marriage and used cyanide-laced capsules to silence them. Dahaad built its story around factual inspiration while taking creative liberties in setting and psychology—an approach Kalamkaval seems to replicate in Malayalam cinema.
Cyanide Mohan’s methodical cruelty gave him macabre fame in Indian criminal history. His cold reasoning, courtroom antics, and decision to defend himself during his trial turned him into a haunting case study of remorseless intelligence.
Lawyers who attended court proceedings in the early 2010s remarked how he cross-examined witnesses with chilling composure, exposing a man disturbingly confident in his intellect and crime.
Mammootty’s Stanley Das invokes this psychological density without directly replaying Mohan’s biography.
