“…and all flesh shall never again be cut off by the water of the flood, neither shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11
Imagine being plunged into an asphyxiating situation, wheezing within the four walls of a failing shelter, imploding with secrets, and surrounded by rising floodwaters. Christo Tomy’s Ullozhukku is two hours of edgy discomfort smeared with familial claustrophobia. A soul-sister to Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Ee Ma Yau (2018), and a spiritual successor to Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021), Ullozhukku orbits the dead body of a son/husband awaiting burial while incessant rainfall slowly submerges the island in the Keralan backwaters. It doesn’t have Pellissery’s dark humour, instead, it convulses under strained human bonds and untethered wires of old-world morality. The film is neatly dissected into an inside and an outside – the interior belongs to a loosening triad structure of mother-son-daughter-in-law and illness, and the exterior comprises a hospital and a forbidden affair. These two contradicting, colliding spaces are connected by the flood and a solitary boat ferrying its passengers.
From a distance, the narrative screws and bolts of the film are utterly familiar, if not a tad convenient. Anju, a salesperson in a saree shop is married off to a wealthy upper class Christian against her desires. After a brief sequence of detached intimacy, we are thrown off guard within the bleached room of a terminally ill patient and his wife qua caretaker. Outside the sick room, we encounter Leelamma, the mother (-in-law) untiringly plodding and praying to Christ. The plotlines suddenly take a suffocating rotation with the death of the son from a malignant tumour in his brain, and the accidental disclosure of Anju’s pregnancy. The womb transforms into a placeholder and an emergency reserve for the tomb. As if everything that has been lost can be restored by sacrificing the agency of a woman. At one point in the story, more than the patrilineal aspects, what carries utmost significance is the position and allegiance of the pregnant housewife. The unborn child becomes an instrument in the hands of Leelamma to bind Anju to this house. However, deep down in the film, one realises that more than the desire to secure the remaining traces of her son, her stubborn attempts are an old woman’s desperation against foreboding loneliness.
For Tomy, the flood operates like a recurring trope forcing the characters to confront each other’s horror. The terrifyingly trembling dimensions of all the women in the film emerge from the annals of patriarchy. Everyone is a victim of suppression and lovelessness. Marriage is a sacred pact that must be sustained by the ideal image of a woman as the appropriated body and the unflinching custodian of ailing male members of the household. Even Thomaskutty, the vulnerable husband reduced to a defunct, if not disabled, machine, holds on to a watch, the only loving memory of his father that was passed on to the son on his deathbed. The dead son and the dead father endlessly haunt the spaces of the living. Leelamma, too, repeatedly tries to substitute her partner’s lack of affection and concern, by compromising the position of Anju. In one such segment, Leelamma defers the burial of Thomaskutty to punish Anju’s trials to come to terms with her agonizing condition and her blooming individuality. In a classic turn of events, a victim sabotages another victim by plotting to preserve the edifice of church and society; ironically, the rotting body of Thomaskutty is pushed to the background. Tomy, at certain precise and relevant moments, cuts to an inundated graveyard where the dead too have been overwhelmed and overwritten by waters.
In one of the most harrowing dream episodes in recent cinematic memory, Thomaskutty returns to claim the illegitimate child. We find a dampened room leaking from the top, Thomaskutty clenching around the bulge, and blood and water dribbling down the thighs of Anju. Waters mutate from torrential rain to flood to tears to amniotic fluid. The flood also stands for the stagnant waters of grief and melancholy. It is the grasp of death that induces fears of separation, mortality, and isolation. The thirst of the living saturates the burial of the dead.
Parvathy, as the reticent and rebellious Anju, and Urvashi, as the impulsive and obdurate mother, unfold as a formidable and passionate force that keeps the film tensed and grounded. Their anxieties and confinement bear tangent traces of the mother-daughter relationship in Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). Christo Tomy’s efficacious water metaphor finds resolution in the promise of an enduring sorority between Anju and Leelamma. Ullozhukku (or Undercurrent) directs us toward these scattered specks of female friendships and new-found identities that must be read as foundational pillars of a society that has lost all its moorings.
