The insider: "Narivetta"

The current Top Ten hit Narivetta continues the South Indian tradition of turning out socially oriented popular cinema, opening with a Milan Kundera quote ("The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting") before proceeding with a narrative that very much remembers the details of 2003's Muthanga incident. There, police opened fire on tribal clans engaged in a peaceful protest against the landgrabs to which they'd fallen subject; the official death toll was five (including one police officer), though that figure remains disputed. Anuraj Manohar's involving thriller, scripted by the journalist and short story writer Abin Joseph, opens that same year, with hero Varghese (Tovino Thomas) being denounced as a troublemaker and pursued into the forests of Kerala by police. Flashbacks to two years earlier, however, find Varghese as a somewhat feckless, cash-scrounging 28-year-old shrugger, still living at home with his mother, who repeatedly turns down job offers on the grounds he's "waiting for something better"; coupled to his lukewarm involvement in community activism, this holdout stance reframes him in a tentatively idealistic light. Varghese does have one thing going for him: his tall, elegant girlfriend Nancy - channelling Sonam Kapoor, Priyamvada Krishnan gives our guy something to look up to - although her mill owner father has plans to marry her off to a moneyed interloper from the Gulf. For a while, you might wonder how the film can possibly get from here to there - but then Nancy gives Varghese an ultimatum, and in order to make the money he needs to prove himself, Varghese takes the first job offer that comes his way. At which point, Manohar and Joseph reveal their film hinges on a grabby, sticky irony: that the troublemaker who sparked that manhunt in the prologue is himself a cop.

What follows proves instructive of key differences between the commercial and independent cinemas. Sandhya Suri's Santosh, which landed in UK arthouses earlier this year (yet remains unreleased in India), landed its cop heroine in a similar mess via what was, in expositionary terms, a bald statement of facts. More mindful of the audience (and censors) it's courting, Narivetta has to give its hero a quest or journey to go on. Yet the two films are pointed to more or less the same end: setting the viewer to question the power we grant our law enforcers in return for watching over us. Varghese's new gig affords him a front-row seat to the baser brutalities of this police force: the breaking of new recruits, the heavy-handed tactics (hardly refined by on-the-job drinking), the flagrant looking for trouble, the use of the uniform to cover their actions. A protest camp, set up by local tribes in response to encroachment by landlords, will become a tinderbox, exposing splits within the force's ranks. Yet it's also where Narivetta becomes positively polyphonic. Manohar doesn't just take the opportunity to hear the protestors out at length, he does something truly democratic with his scene-to-scene sound mix, leaving the villagers' chants and conversations audible in the background while Varghese and his colleagues mutter, bicker and spar among themselves. The movie acknowledges there will be different sides and distinct factions within this debate; it also takes a level of care to weigh their voices. There's already a certain thrill at seeing a movie at the heart of the modern multiplex that means to get people thinking and talking, and maybe even acting on those words.

Some of the credit for that should go to Thomas, an actor who's elevated himself to regional stardom without fully sloughing off his conscience; that much was apparent from last year's A.R.M., to all external appearances a goofy National Treasure-style diversion, albeit one that consciously veered into addressing matters of caste. Varghese is no angel, and Thomas plays him as such: weak-chinned, cowardly and easily given to violence, the character is exactly the type you could imagine turning a blind eye to - or even going along with - any dereliction of duty. (Certain scenes, indeed, call his heroism into troubling question.) But unlike the system he enters into, he does know right from wrong. What others deem troublemaking is actually the first time we see this man doing his job correctly: pushing for a full and frank investigation, and thus for true justice, rather than covering his or anybody else's back. He finally finds a cause worth taking up arms for, even as it leaves him in turn a marked man. Manohar may be a better polemicist than he is the new Rajamouli: when it all kicks off at the protest site, the action strikes the eye as a little scrappy, though he pulls blazing images - literally so, in the case of a dog in flames - into view here and there; he also makes imaginative use of the primal backdrop as a sort of wild, wild East. Yet he's a really forceful polemicist, one who senses there has to be a better way to police ourselves than handing any old Tom, Dick or Dirty Harry a badge and arming them to the back teeth. That Kundera quote isn't an idle gesture, and the movie that ensues shapes up as unusually angular, provocative, not to mention universal pop cinema: a film that unfolds across a few hundred square feet in Kerala that would land just as potently in the Prague of 1968, the Watts of 1992, the Minneapolis of 2020, or indeed - were there cinemas or any other shelters left standing there - the Gaza of 2025.

Narivetta is now playing in selected cinemas.