Hawk’s Muffin review: A strange Malayalam film that remixes Churuli and Stalker

Krishnendu Kalesh’s feature film debut Hawk’s Muffin (Malayalam title: Prappeda) is a weird film, sharing DNA with such Indian films as Q’s Tasher Desh or Lilo Jose Pellissery’s Churuli. It was premiered in the Bright Future section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam this week. Will Hawk’s Muffin create as much buzz as Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s 2017 Malayalam film Sexy Durga (released in India as S Durga) and PS Vinothraj’s 2021 film Pebbles (Tamil title: Koozhangal)? Both films won the IFFR’s top Tiger Award and got warm notices in India, the latter becoming India’s entry for the Best International Feature Film award at the 2022 Oscars.

Despite supposedly tackling heavy themes (patriarchy, war, military-industrial complex, environment and ecology), Hawk’s Muffin is too obscurantist for Kalesh’s concerns to land. An easy label will be “surreal”, but it’s not surreal in the way, say, David Lynch films are. They are puzzles that operate on dream logic, with a story and screenplay backing up the narrative. Hawk’s Muffin was reportedly made without a screenplay. Most of it was improvised. What we get is one strange scene after another. The best way to watch this is to sit back and soak in the weirdness, thinking “Ok, what next?”, hoping that the logic will reveal itself. If you keep wondering “What does this mean?”, you might get frustrated, because the writer-director doesn’t want you to understand the story in literal terms. 

Well, there isn’t a story in the first place. There are only ideas, which Kalesh wants you to get a hang of, and then make you go “WTF” with his treatment. He is definitely an imaginative filmmaker, but if he seriously wanted to communicate his thoughts with the audience, instead of just trying to impress them with the images he can come up with, he should have turned his ideas into a story and screenplay.

Shot in a rubber estate in Kerala, Hawk’s Muffin is set in a post-pandemic India and unfolds in an otherworldly space similar to the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) or the labyrinthine jungle in Churuli. A young woman Ruby (Ketaki Narayan) is the sole heir to the estate, but she is held captive by a collective of men emboldened by tradition and weaponry. The caretaker is Xaviour (Jayanarayan T), a military man with a mysterious past.

Ruby’s forefather, an army pilot, had set up this jungle community after he dropped a bomb somewhere and was commanded to go into hiding. For decades, this remote estate has been run like a jail. The caretaker ensures that the family’s women never go too far from their house, the labourers silently work, and there are no trespassers. The arrival of a stranger (Rajesh Madhavan), who’s probably a robot (or alien, who knows?), and a cop, Thumpan (Nithin George), who claims to be Ruby’s relative and wants a stake in the property, shakes things up. There’s also Ruby’s paralysed mother (Nina Kurup). She shares a moment with her daughter, which reminded me of the hand-pump scene from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D.

Kalesh had previously made a black-and-white short film, Karinchathan, which is available on YouTube with subtitles. Intended to be a statement about the Charlie Hebdo shooting of 2015, the film follows two men who try to kill a cartoonist but get trapped in what feels like a bad dream. Hawk’s Muffin shares a bunch of motifs with that film.

Both films feature a house where there’s some strange power at work. The story gets moving when outsiders barge in. A spiritual advisor is involved, and there’s a chase in the jungle. There’s an attempt to create audio-visual dissonance, using anachronistic music, editing jumps, and odd cinematographic choices, such as super 8mm filters. Kalesh begins his films with lofty quotes and dedicates them to the masters. 

Hawk’s Muffin starts with a dedication to Georges Melies, Andrei Tarkovsky, George Miller and Hayao Miyazaki. I saw elements of all four director’s works in Hawk’s Muffin, possibly because Kalesh dropped their names, and I was trying to think how they are connected. Kalesh’s thematic concern in these films is the triumph of the human spirit against power-hungry and reactionary forces, which is fine, but I am not a big fan of his filmmaking. I’d rather watch a film which doesn’t make me think that the director is fumbling in the dark, with some half-baked concepts.

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The major asset of Hawk’s Muffin is its production values. I think the biggest beneficiary of this production will be visual effects artist Thoufeek Hussain, who gives the film its uncanny feel with its supernatural creatures, Chinook helicopters, and giant machines drilling into the earth. Manesh Madhavan, who shot the 2018 Malayalam thriller Joseph, is the cinematographer. Kiran Das (Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, Moothon) is the editor. Nithin Lukose (Thithi, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar) is the sound designer. Popular Malayalam composer Bijibal scored the movie. The lesson here is: get a great crew for your first feature film.

Hawk’s Muffin (Prappeda)

Director: Krishnendu Kalesh

Cast: Ketaki Narayan, Rajesh Madhavan, Nithin George, Jayanarayan T, Nina Kurup