Holy ghosts: "Sarvam Maya"

Sometimes a film gets you onside with a run of Scenes We Haven't Seen, something fresh, playful and funny. Akhil Sathyan's year-ending Malayalam hit Sarvam Maya opens with the sight of a band's manager fretting that of the fifteen visas he's applied for ahead of the ensemble's upcoming European tour, only fourteen have been granted; he then has to tell guitarist Prabhendru (local star Nivin Pauly) that he won't be going, ideally before he enters the online confirmation code that will buy him a winter tour jacket. (An ultra-modern race-against-time.) Good, we exhale, settling back into our multiplex seat, here's another South Indian writer-director who's retained some legible idea of how the real world works. That early assumption will come to be tested over the two hours that follow, but for now, with our hero's hopes of global musical stardom having been dashed, the question is what Prabhendru - who, we learn, trained as a priest, renounced his faith and refused a job in his family's puja business so as to follow his dreams - is going to do next. This will be answered over the course of the film's enjoyably zigzagging first half. He returns to his hometown, much like the heroines of so many Hallmark Christmas movies; he winds up having to conduct puja (religious cleansing) ceremonies after his cousin puts his back out; and he's eventually called upon to carry out an exorcism on a young boy, with mixed results. On the plus side, Prabhendru successfully extracts possessing spirit from boy; on the downside, he coaxes her out into his world, where she proves an altogether stubborn spectre: a highly online twentysomething (Riya Shibu), clad in Friends and Lilo and Stitch T-shirts, who's wondering what on earth she's doing in this state but has resolved in the meantime to carry on as normal. Her first undertaking is to reset the exorcist's WhatsApp photo; her perfect teeth suggest an exceptionally high calibre of dentistry in the afterlife. The real crisis Prabhendru is facing, it turns out, isn't professional but spiritual: Western viewers could be forgiven for thinking they were watching some Hallmark remake of Scrooged.

Ever since the deserved success of 2018's witty, knowing Stree, Indian cinema has unleashed a series of ever more noisy and zany comedy-horrors. Sathyan, by contrast, goes the opposite way: even after the ghost gains a nickname (Delulu), a kind of naturalism persists within these frames. Pauly's Prabhendru is occasionally perplexed but largely chill when faced with this apparition, partly because she's wearing her jimjams (those branded tees are surely the 2025 equivalent of a white sheet), partly because he recognises this is the kind of spirited presence who might help turn a shrugging slacker's life around. Playing everything with a sincerely held, insistently straight bat yields droll, amusing juxtapositions (under the opening credits, we watch Prabhendru and his cousin blessing a JCB), but in the second half, life lessons start to outnumber the gags. Now there are heartbreaks to heal, family ties to mend, a sick pooch to cure, and Prabhendru has to see off the teenage drug dealers who've been causing trouble on the outskirts of town, an action sequence that enables Pauly to throw punches you don't really believe the character would. (Wouldn't a jobbing musician be buying from the dealers, rather than tossing them into a lake?) Here as elsewhere, Sarvam Maya is a bit too squarely conservative to have the fun it might with its own premise: the expert ensemble of comic players the first half assembles spend the second sitting around waiting for something funny to say or do. Shibu is charming company, but the character floats within touching distance of manic pixie dream ghost: Delulu's here to ensure the star gets all the girls and a last-reel guitar solo. That said, I was rather fond of Sathyan and Pauly's conception of this accidental priest, not as some fire-and-brimstone pulpit bully, but a befuddled shepherd nudging lost souls in the right direction out of a hope someone might do the same for him. That's sweet (and rings true-ish); the songs, by Justin Prabhakam, are terrific; and there's a nice ending to set you back on the cold winter streets with a warm Ready Brek glow. I could see why it's become a hit, but also that it's a tale told by a seminary student: its piousness is a slight limitation, something you have to look past.

Sarvam Maya is now playing in selected cinemas.