Opinion A boat in the mist: The quiet eloquence of Shaji N Karun's films

Indian Express

29-04-2025

Some filmmakers tell stories. Some chase moments. And then there was Shaji N Karun, who listened to the world breathe, and shaped cinema out of that deep silence.
You didn't watch Karun's movies the way you watch most Malayalam movies. You lived inside it, like walking through a memory you couldn't quite name. A father endlessly looking for his son. A Kathakali artist slipping between roles and realities. A mother holding on to the air because there's nothing else left to hold. In his movies, time slowed down.
For Karun, cinema was never about commanding attention. It was about tending to absences: What remains unsaid, what remains unseen. His characters didn't just perform their emotions; they bore them, carrying them like secret injuries. And in doing so, they let us glimpse something raw and rare: The texture of endurance itself.
Before he became a director, Karun was one of Indian cinema's finest cinematographers. He learned early that sometimes a shaft of light across a wooden floor could say more than a hundred lines of dialogue.
Working alongside masters like G Aravindan and M T Vasudevan Nair in films like Thampu, Kummatty and Manju, he found a way of looking at the world that was both tender and unflinching.
In his lens, rivers, mist, sea and human faces didn't just decorate the story. They became the story. Each shot felt composed with the patience of an oil painting, where a scene was not just captured, but contemplated.
He used the camera like a patient hand tracing the textures of a world already full of stories. Light, colour, and silence were not accessories in his films. Sometimes a still glance, a waiting corridor, or the hush before a ritual had the whole weight of the themes handled.
By the time he made his own films, the instinct to find emotion inside the image had deepened into something unmistakably his own. His movies were meditations on loss, longing, and the brittle dignity of survival.
In an industry where loudness often passes for emotion, Shaji N Karun gave us something infinitely harder to capture: A cinema of listening.
Shaped by forces deeper than plot, Karun's movies become elemental. Loss, exile and the ache of unrealised dreams aren't just themes. They're the water his characters swim in.
Piravi (1988), for instance, begins with a father, played by Premji, searching for his missing son. But what lingers isn't just the search. It is the way hope itself begins to decay, quietly, like fruit left out too long. In Swaham (1994), a mother fights against the indifference of the world with nothing but the stubbornness of her own love.
Vanaprastham (1999) collapses the distance between art and life, mask and man, until everything becomes unbearable and beautiful at once. It also captures the core of Mohanlal's flexibility, bringing out one of Indian cinema's most intense performances.
And Kutty Srank (2009) blends the mythic storytelling with a distinctly local sensibility, the rugged landscapes of the sea and forest becoming extensions of Mammootty 's title character.
There is always a performance at the heart of his films, from the characters themselves, struggling to hold together some dignity in a world that threatens to unmake them. Grief in these films is not loud. It settles, heavy and wordless, across your chest, because Karun offered something very few filmmakers dare to: A mirror to our wounded selves.
It is tempting to place Karun neatly alongside the other giants of Malayalam parallel cinema — Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Aravindan and John Abraham. But he arrived when their art had already opened the door. He walked through it carrying grief, separation and silence and a camera that knew how to wait. Where Adoor examined social structures and Aravindan conjured riddles, Karun stayed with something more fragile: The emotional residue of living.
This sensibility gave him a global voice. Piravi earned him a Caméra d'Or mention at Cannes. Swaham was in the running for the Palme d'Or. Vanaprastham was selected in the Un Certain Regard section.
But even as the world recognised him, Karun never became part of the noise. He stayed close to the ground, close to Kerala's soil, to its myths and music, its silences and losses. His films feel like they're happening somewhere close by, just beyond the next door.
This isn't a curtain call. Karun's cinema was never meant to conclude, only to echo. His frames will stay alive in the quiet corners of our minds, like embers that never quite die out. Somewhere, a boat still drifts through mist. Somewhere, a silence still holds a story. And years from now, someone will definitely stumble upon one of his films and feel, without knowing why, a lump in their throat.