Subaltern mythic rage and the monstrous-feminine in recent Malayalam cinema

Abstract

Recent Malayalam cinema returns to folklore under conditions of feminist contestation and expanded platform circulation. This article compares Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra (2025) and Bramayugam (2024) to examine how inherited supernatural figures reorganize gendered injury, caste-feudal memory, embodied fear, oral knowledge, and transregional visibility. Using qualitative feminist textual and contextual analysis, the article shows how these retellings connect gendered experience and cultural memory with the films' images, sound, and circulation. Historically situating the films against Malayalam cinema's earlier economies of female suffering and spectral revenge, the study argues that Lokah converts Kalliyankattu Neeli into a mobile superwoman while making mythic rage legible through neon metropolitanism, spectacular agency, and franchise grammar. Bramayugam , despite its predominantly male cast, exposes patriarchal and caste domination through a feudal household, a threshold female spirit, possessed authority, and a precarious bardic voice. Their sonic worlds extend this contrast: Lokah 's constructed language Mozhika invokes indigenous-coded oral memory while risking aestheticized difference, whereas the bard's singing functions as labour, survival, and counter-archive within feudal confinement. Post-COVID platform circulation enlarges the reach of regional folklore while making it increasingly classifiable and commercially portable. It concludes that feminist retelling is politically productive precisely because recovery and commodification remain structurally entangled.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Women s Studies International Forum, 2026 · DOI ↗