Indian actor Parvathy Thiruvothu has spent two decades fighting the system from outside it – both on screen and off. In “Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar” (“Prima Facie Guilty”), the Shahad Nilambur-directed thriller now running in theaters, she’s finally on the inside, portraying a police officer for the first time in a Malayalam film. But the actor still feels she’s living under constant judgment after speaking out against misogyny in Malayalam cinema nearly a decade ago.
In “Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar,” produced by Arjun Selva under 11 Icons Film Productions, Thiruvothu plays Aleena Abraham, a woman who becomes a police officer through a compassionate appointment after the death of her husband, also a constable. Set largely inside a local police station, the film follows Aleena alongside fellow officers Divya, Dasan and Sreenath as an unexpected criminal case upends the precinct, testing perceptions of guilt, duty and systemic justice. The film’s plot repeatedly asks how quickly an audience decides someone’s guilt based on incomplete evidence.
Thiruvothu says the film departs from convention by revealing the central crime within its first 10 to 15 minutes, shifting the tension from whodunit to whether the officers involved will be found out. The role marks Thiruvothu’s first time in uniform in a Malayalam film, though not her first police role. She played Kranthi Shenoy, a plainclothes deputy commissioner, in the Prime Video series “Dhootha,” and has dubbed the Malayalam-language version of a police officer played by Kareena Kapoor Khan in “Daayra.” Getting the physical details of Aleena right meant training, then deliberately undoing some of it.
Thiruvothu learned the correct police salute during preparation, then had to hold something back on camera so the character would not appear well-versed in procedure.She also spent time on set with real policewomen, some of whom worked as extras on their days off, and separately discussed police procedure at length with Indian Police Service officer Ajeetha Begum in the past. Thiruvothu has not watched “Santosh,” Sandhya Suri’s Cannes-debuting film in which Shahana Goswami plays a policewoman who takes up her late husband’s post through a similar compassionate appointment. Subramanian and Vijesh Thottungal.
Thiruvothu credits Subramanian with the plot’s procedural logic and Thottungal with its emotional core, describing the narration as “two steps forward, one step back,” repeatedly revealing what audiences thought they already understood before raising a new complication. Thiruvothu has been the subject of public scrutiny since 2017, when she spoke out about misogyny in the Malayalam film industry, and has since been active with the Women in Cinema Collective and in the aftermath of the Justice Hema Committee report. The committee, formed by the Kerala government in 2017 to investigate sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the Malayalam film industry, submitted its findings in 2019; the report was made public only in August 2024, after a Kerala High Court order, and detailed systemic harassment, wage discrimination and the blacklisting of women who spoke up.
And that has been happening since I’d say 2016, since I called out misogyny in cinema. So I feel like most of the time when the cancel train comes, they cancel you, and then they like you again, and then they’ll again cancel you saying that, ‘Oh, you didn’t say anything about this,’ or, ‘You seem to have done that,’ ‘You seem to be on this side.'” Asked about the state of activism in the Malayalam film industry, Thiruvothu points to the implementation of Internal Complaints Committees on film sets, mandated under India’s sexual harassment law but resisted for years by industry unions, as a concrete gain. She also voiced deep skepticism of institutions in India that ask women to simply wait for justice.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
