Pennum Porattum Review: A Manic, Messy And Meaningful Satire
There is a peculiar pleasure in spilling out of a theatre, listening to post-show philosophers clutching half finished popcorn. The sharpest line of the night? Villages preserve peace like pickle in a glass jar, tightly sealed, sun dried and carefully guarded. It looks secure. Until one rumour, one refusal, one barking dog sends the lid flying.Apparently, peace expires faster than pickle.
It’s unsettling how quickly a quiet village can turn into a courtroom. In Pennum Porattum, Rajesh Madhavan throws you straight into it. From the first few minutes, you sense that this isn’t going to be a neat story about right and wrong. It’s going to be noisy, messy, a little ridiculous and very much familiar.
The film unfolds in a fictional village in Palakkad, where peace has technically been established years ago.Weapons were given up, violence was renounced, harmony supposedly won. But scratch the surface, and you realise nothing really disappears, it just changes form.
All it takes is one private conversation going public. Charulatha ( Raina Radhakrishnan)rejects a man’s proposition. That should have been the end of it. Instead, it becomes everyone’s business. Suddenly, the village is less interested in what happened and more interested in what she meant. Her morality becomes a community project.
At the same time, another hunt is underway, for Suttu, a Dalmatian rumoured to have rabies. The parallel is not subtle, but it is effective. One is chased for crossing a physical boundary. The other for crossing a moral one.
And here is where the film gets clever.Suttu, voiced by Tovino Thomas is given interiority. He thinks, he reflects.The humans, meanwhile react. They shout, they assemble mobs, they defend order.It’s darkly funny that the most self-aware character in the film is the dog.
Yes, there are echoes of Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam and Avihitham in the rural setting, the gossip economy, the ensemble chaos. You will quietly remember them. But Pennum Porattum is not cut from the same cloth. Where those films simmered, Rajesh Madhavan lets this one boil over.This one is much louder and more absurd.
There are stretches where that spiral feels exhausting. A fight breaks out during a celebration. Then reconciliation. Then more chaos. At times, the absurdity threatens to become repetitive. You can see the director pushing the madness a little too far, almost daring the audience to keep up.But just when it feels like it might lose itself, the film finds its footing again.
What works best is the discomfort. The film never paints the villagers as monsters. That would have been easy. Instead, it shows how normal people justify cruelty when it’s wrapped in the language of tradition.Nobody thinks they are the villain. That is the whole point.
Raina Radhakrishnan plays Charulatha with a quiet steadiness. She simply stands there, watching the circus unfold around her. Dinesh, as the casually entitled man at the centre of the scandal, represents a very specific kind of modern hypocrisy progressive in words, conservative in reflex.
The ensemble cast, largely newcomers from Palakkad, lends the film cultural texture. Their performances feel lived in rather than staged, enhancing the authenticity of the setting.
Technically, the film complements its mood well. The camera frequently shifts perspective, sometimes aligning us with Suttu, sometimes with the mob. The editing keeps the frenzy alive, though a little trimming might have made certain stretches sharper. The production design captures the lived-in texture of a village where celebration and confrontation share the same courtyard.
Rajesh Madhavan falters occasionally when absurdity tips into excess. Some sequences stretch longer than necessary, as though the film is testing how much disorder the audience can endure. But he ultimately pulls the threads together, ensuring that the politics beneath the pandemonium is not drowned out.
Pennum Porattum is a sharp satire on control over women’s bodies, over desire, over narratives, over animals, over chaos itself. In a village desperate to preserve order, it is the dog who learns freedom, and the woman who exposes hypocrisy. Everyone else just keeps running convinced they are protecting morality, when in truth, they are protecting discomfort.
