Ronth: Bleak Malayalam gem burns Bollywood at the stake with its harrowing and haunting final 20 minutes

Indian Express

3 days ago

In a recent interview, Arshad Warsi — the star of Dhamaal, Krazzy 4, and Golmaal: Fun Unlimited — ate a bunch of yakitori and decided that he must take pot-shots at Satyajit Ray. Mocking the sort of movies in which characters spend 15 minutes walking up a staircase, Warsi joked that they could simply announce the characters' arrival at his or her destination, and save precious time. He'd probably hate the new Malayalam-language film Ronth, a slow-burn thriller if there ever was one. The movie understands a key aspect of storytelling: sometimes, it's not about the destination, it's about the 15-minute journey up a flight of stairs.
A much-needed return to form for writer-director Shahi Kabir, who penned the brilliant Nayattu but also the unbearable Officer on Duty, Ronth follows two cops — it's a traditional veteran-rookie partnership in the vein of Training Day and Se7en — on an increasingly intense night shift in the Kerala countryside. They respond to calls, trace a missing girl, and even have a brush with the supernatural. But it is when the sun rises that Kabir puts the movie through a drastic tonal shift. Ronth has the effect of watching Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, but with the horrifically bleak climax of Hereditary tacked on at the end.
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Played by Dileesh Pothan and Roshan Mathew, the two officers discover that they are just as vulnerable as the ordinary citizens that they have been sworn to protect. Despite their different ideologies and opposing approaches to police work — Mathew's Dinnath is idealistic, while Pothan's Yohannan has had the idealism knocked out of him — the two cops are mere pawns on the grand chessboard of power. Kabir foreshadows this sentiment when he has Yohannan walk past us in the film's opening scene, separated by bars on a window. He has always been incarcerated by the systems of survival; perhaps he knows this, perhaps he doesn't.
Over the course of the night, Yohannan and Dinnath clash often — the veteran mocks his new partner for being overeager and a bit naïve. But gradually, they begin to understand each other. Yohannan has a soft corner for children, and his job forces him to interact with several of them, often in situations of peril. It is revealed that his son was stillborn, a tragedy that wrecked his wife's psyche. Dinnath, on the other hand, is a new father. He is desperate to provide a healthy life for his child, and his sincerity sears through Yohannan's unsentimental soul.
After all, cynicism is only sincerity with experience. In between missing girls and annoying ghouls, the cops come across a group of seemingly lost young men. They point them in the right direction. Little do they know that the group was in the middle of committing a heinous crime, a crime that our heroes became unwitting accessories to the minute they helped the guys out. Decency, Ronth says rather despairingly, is the cause of their downfall. Yohannan would've spotted something fishy had his guard not been lowered by Dinnath's gullibility. Earlier in the film, the young officer had waved away a couple of obvious miscreants when they told him that they were on the way to the hospital. Perhaps having an ailing mother at home convinced him that people wouldn't lie about such a thing. Yohannan had a good laugh at his expense, further positioning himself as the wise one.
But nothing can prepare either you or Arshad Warsi for what the movie does in its post-dawn epilogue. You have to hand it to the Malayali filmmakers; they don't pull punches. After being caught interacting with the group of murderers on CCTV, Dinnath and Yohannan are quickly arrested. They are told that the men they helped earlier that night killed a Dalit youth. The killers suspected him of having eloped with a woman from their presumably upper-caste community. Dinnath and Yohannan's bosses know that had nothing to do with the murder, but they need to pin the blame on somebody, and who better than the two nobody cops that have conveniently attached themselves to the crime?
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In yet another cruel test of their decency, the top cop tries to get them to pin the blame on each other. The seasoned Yohannan is having none of it. 'I've done the same thing in hundreds of interrogations, don't try these tricks with me; they won't work. I'll take you to court, and I'll win. Bring it on,' he says. However, the clearly distraught Dinnath cracks under pressure. He sells his partner out, and promptly discovers that they will both be taken to court anyway. Dinnath is wracked with guilt; of letting his wife and child down, of throwing Yohannan under the bus, and of possibly never seeing his dying mother again. He makes a run for it, and is struck down by a bus — it's karmic justice for the sin he committed.
Dinnath is the more virtuous of the two. But he is given a more cruel punishment than Yohannan, who is identified as more slippery than his partner. In an earlier scene, he happily accepts a bribe from a priest, who reappears in more unfortunate circumstances later in the film, when Yohannan reaches out to him for a favour. It is revealed that he had been punished for his sins before Dinnath's voice had probably even cracked; Yohannan had been stewing in the consequences of his actions for decades. Ronth gives a rather straightforward story the sprawl of a Biblical tragedy. Virtually every other filmmaker in this country would have ended the film at daybreak; not a single person in Bollywood would've had the patience or the palate for the extended epilogue. But it is a testament to the bravery of Malayalam directors that movies like Ronth are allowed to exist on their own terms, and not those of an audience conditioned to tolerate mediocrity.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there's always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a 'Rotten Tomatoes-approved' critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police.
You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at [e-mail]. He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More