Malayalam Director Sanal Sasidharan alleges plagiarism in Mohanlal-starrer 'Thudarum'

New Indian Express

5 hours ago

NEW DELHI: Acclaimed Malayalam filmmaker Sanal Kumar Sasidharan has accused the makers of the blockbuster film Thudarum, starring Mohanlal and directed by Tharun Moorthy, of plagiarising the screenplay of his unreleased project Theeyattam.
In a detailed Facebook post, Sasidharan alleged that the core structure of Thudarum closely mirrors that of Theeyattam, which he wrote in 2020. The filmmaker claims that the plot of his script, which revolves around an auto-rickshaw driver named Ambi who is falsely implicated in a murder case, has striking similarities to the storyline of Thudarum.
'I saw the movie Thudarum. It's made by stealing the skeleton of my screenplay Theeyattam, which I wrote in 2020. The core of it remains untouched perhaps because the makers lacked the intelligence to grasp it or deliberately rewrote it in an unrecognisable way,' he wrote.
Sasidharan pointed out what he believes is a significant "slip-up" by the Thudarum team the inclusion of a distinct dialogue from his script that he says had no contextual relevance in the film. The proverb in question, 'Konnaal paapam thinnaal theerum' (loosely translated as 'the sin of killing is absolved by eating the victim'), was, according to him, lifted directly from Theeyattam.