Ullozhukku: In Christo Tomy’s film, two women rise above the flood of grief, loneliness

Nearly two decades later, in Ullozhukku, she returns to the role of a mother figure. In a film that portrays emotional claustrophobia with remarkable restraint, she plays Leelamma, a woman caught in a whirlpool of shared grief and buried resentment with her daughter-in-law, Anju (the stunning Parvathy Thiruvothu), a woman whose life has been dictated by others.

Married to Thomaskutty (Prashanth Murali), a man dying a slow, painful death, Anju is bound by obligation, not by love. Her marriage is the culmination of a series of betrayals: her parents forced her into it, concealing Thomaskutty’s chronic illness, and in doing so, they severed her relationship with Rajeev (Arjun Radhakrishnan), the man she truly loved.

A marriage of no return

Ullozhukku, a mournful dirge of a movie centred on a death in the family and the quest to bury the dead, is set in the rain-soaked, flooded expanse of Alappuzha, Kerala, a region at the mercy of its waters. It is not just the relentless rains or the rising floods that threaten to drown the characters, but also the heaving heaviness of love, guilt, betrayal, and implacable social expectations. A tale of one woman’s bid to reclaim agency in a society that denies it to her, Ullozhukku is as devastating as it is deeply perceptive, navigating the fragile, intersecting lives of its characters with tremendous dexterity.

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While Anju is forcefully married, her love for Rajeev has not died. The affair that persists between them is neither reckless nor romanticised. It is, instead, fraught with desperation and guilt, clinging to the one shred of agency Anju believes she has left. When she discovers she is pregnant with Rajeev’s child, the stakes rise to unbearable levels, setting into motion a series of revelations that unravel the fragile threads holding her world together.

The floods as metaphor

Tomy’s decision to set the film during the catastrophic monsoon season is no mere stylistic choice. The flooded landscape of Alappuzha mirrors the emotional turbulence of the characters while also acting as a literal impediment to closure. When Thomaskutty dies, his funeral is repeatedly delayed due to the inundation, leaving Anju, his mother Leelamma, and the rest of the family in a purgatory of grief and recrimination.

The rain in Ullozhukku is oppressive. It traps the characters, forces confrontations, and denies escape. The incessant sound of water — the rain beating against the roof, the floodwaters lapping at the door — becomes a relentless background score to the mounting tension within the household. The floodwaters may rise and fall, but Anju’s entrapment feels eternal.

A woman’s solitude

Ullozhukku is a film about the impossibility of freedom for women in the patriarchal Malayali society. Anju’s affair with Rajeev feels like a gasp for air in a suffocating milieu, where her youthfulness, her desire seem to be crucified at the altar of marriage to a man already on his way out. Yet, even this attempt at reclaiming her autonomy is met with judgment, shaming, and rejection. When Leelamma discovers the affair and the truth of the pregnancy, the confrontation inevitably gets wound up in morality.

Urvashi’s Leelamma, however, is no villain. Though shaped by the same patriarchal forces that now condemn Anju, she is cut from a different cloth. So, her outrage at Anju is not purely about Thomaskutty’s betrayal but about the shattering of the carefully maintained facade of family honour. It is a confrontation between two generations of women; one of them has stoically accepted the burden of social expectations and another dares to question it.

As the much-suffering Anju, Parvathy is exquisite in every frame. You can feel her anguish. Her silences speak louder than her words, her body language a portrait of a woman torn between love and duty, hope and despair. Like Leelamma’s, Anju’s loneliness, even in a house full of people, is palpable, and her increasing alienation as the truth comes to light forms the emotional crux of the film.

Women who dream of freedom

Though her love, Rajeev is not the hero of Anju’s story. He is flawed, hesitant, and ultimately unequal to the challenges that their love presents. His failure to fully support her is not born of malice but of fear of society, of judgment, of responsibility. This failure is emblematic of the film’s larger themes: that love, in a patriarchal society, is always conditional. Whether it is the love of a parent, a spouse, or a lover, it comes with strings attached, demands compliance, and often leaves women to bear the consequences alone.

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The film shows how the family itself can condemn a woman to a life of suffering. This betrayal is not unique to Anju; it represents the systemic ways in which women’s agency is undermined. As the funeral drags on, delayed by the unyielding rains, Anju’s isolation gets more pronounced.

And more secrets tumble out of the family closet. When the funeral finally takes place, the ceremony hardly feels like an act of closure. It’s more like a punctuation mark on Anju’s steadily dimming, already-doomed hopes. But it’s in the climax that the film triumphs, revealing another side of Anju that lends Ullozhukku its power.

Tomy’s direction is steeped in the understanding of the power dynamics in a family, especially the emotional undercurrents of women. The cinematography by Jomon T. John turns Alappuzha into a character in its own right. The sound design, with its constant interplay of rain, water, and silence, amplifies the film’s tension and melancholy. Urvashi’s Leelamma is a standout, of course, but I found Parvathy to be equally at ease and deep in the character’s skin.

Ullozhukku portrays patriarchy’s insidiousness and lays bare the everyday ways in which women’s lives are controlled and diminished. Ultimately, it’s a searing indictment of patriarchy and an empathetic exploration of the strength of women who dare to dream of freedom.