John Abraham’s 1986 film Amma Ariyan, now heading to Cannes 2026, remains one of Malayalam cinema’s most-politically charged and unsettling masterpieces, notes Sreeju Sudhakaran.
Key Points
- John Abraham’s 1986 film Amma Ariyan has gained renewed attention after its restored version was selected for screening at the 2026 Cannes film festival.
- Amma Ariyan is noted for its unconventional structure, raw acting, and documentary-style narration, which were revolutionary for its time and contribute to its unique holding power.
- The narrative explores themes of systemic decay, police brutalities, and the struggles of the working class.
Starting this piece on a note of whimsicality, the first thing that surprised me when I began watching Amma Ariyan recently was just how young Joy Mathew looked in the film. His thick wavy hairstyle and that unmistakably heavy baritone remain constant, of course, but seeing all that black hair still felt oddly jarring.
Then again, he was only 25 when the film released in 1986.
Still, can you blame me for finding his ‘youth’ so unusual when the next time he appeared in a film was 26 years later, in a cameo in his own directorial debut, the fantastic Shutter?
From there on, Joy Mathew became an almost regular fixture in Malayalam cinema, often playing stern fathers or elders in films with notable roles in Amen, Honey Bee, Idukki Gold, 1983, Munnariyippu and Drishyam 2 among others.
What Amma Ariyan Is About
In Amma Ariyan, Joy Mathew plays Purushan, whom I assume to be a PhD student from Wayanad. The film begins with him bidding farewell to his mother before leaving for Delhi for research.
On the way to the railway station, the community vehicle in which he is travelling is stopped by the police, who need it to transport the unidentified body of a young man who has died by suicide on a hilltop.
Purushan finds the dead man’s face strangely familiar, and the encounter disturbs him so deeply that he abandons his Delhi trip and decides to uncover the man’s identity.
With the help of acquaintances, he soon learns that the corpse belongs to Hari, a tabla player. Determined to personally inform Hari’s mother about her son’s death, Purushan begins a journey from Wayanad to Kochi.
As he travels from place to place, the group accompanying him steadily grows with people who once knew Hari, each contributing fragments of memory that slowly sketch the portrait of a troubled young man.
Amma Ariyan has recently returned to public conversation thanks to its restored version (in 4k) being selected for screening at the Cannes film festival 2026.
For those who, like me, cannot exactly afford a trip to the French Riviera to catch the restored print, there is thankfully a very good version available on YouTube uploaded by Potato Eaters Collective, a channel dedicated to rare avant-garde shorts and indie classics.
I had first watched Amma Ariyan long ago as a child, perhaps on Doordarshan. Back then, I was far too young to fully grasp the film’s rhythms and politics, but I distinctly remember being stunned by its final scene.
Leaving audiences shaken in the last frame was something its revolutionary director, John Abraham, excelled at.
John Abraham’s Vision and Legacy
The late filmmaker directed only four films: Vidyarthikale Ithile Ithile, Agraharathil Kazhuthai, Cheriyachante Kroorakrithyangal and Amma Ariyan.
If you have seen all of them, you would find a recurring current of dissent running through his cinema, one that travels from the lower rungs of society to the highest structures of power.
In Amma Ariyan, that dissent acquires an even more meta quality, carrying John Abraham’s own frustration with the political state of affairs, a frustration reflected both in Purushan and in the deceased Hari. This is a far more personal work of the filmmaker than the rest of his works.
Viewed through a modern lens, the structural rawness of Amma Ariyan is impossible to ignore.
The acting occasionally feels too raw in places, the dialogues can sound stilted, and the juxtaposition of documentary-style narration with the story of a man driven to suicide feels highly unconventional.
Yet that structural unevenness is precisely where the film transformed itself into such a curious masterpiece and became revolutionary for its time.
Much like its radical creator, the film defiantly rejects traditional storytelling conventions and even conventional methods of production.
Reportedly the first crowd-funded Malayalam film, Amma Ariyan ultimately becomes a film about the plight of that very crowd which financed it.
Even the film’s limitations evolve into strengths. I remember reading cinematographer Venu discussing how John Abraham originally wanted to shoot the film in colour, but financial constraints made black-and-white 35mm the only viable option.
Ironically, that restriction works beautifully for the film, lending it an austere, haunting quality.
The film concludes with a striking fourth-wall break where the characters themselves watch the very film we have been watching, as if John Abraham is telling the audience that what they are witnessing is not fiction but their own oppressed lives unfolding onscreen.
For the time Amma Ariyan released, such choices were genuinely pathbreaking.
PS: Another such striking ‘fourth wall’ break in Malayalam Cinema happened two years earlier in K G George’s brilliant drama Adaminte Vaariyellu.
Exploring the Societal Decay In Its Rawness
The title itself comes from the letter Purushan promises his mother he would write once he reaches Delhi. From bidding goodbye to his own mother to eventually meeting Hari’s bereaved mother, Purushan’s journey from Wayanad to Kochi is populated with mothers mourning the emotional collapse of young men like Hari.
The film’s most heartbreaking moment arrives when Purushan informs Hari’s mother of her son’s death. She instantly realises that Hari has died by suicide. And judging by the curt, resigned manner in which she later speaks to the police officer, she already understands why.
Hari himself becomes a figure constructed through conflicting identities offered by those who knew him at different psychological stages of his life. To some, he was a gifted tabla player. To another, he was curiously ‘Tony’, the drummer.
For some, he was politically conscious, who leans towards Marxism, and he was a coward for others. He was a victim of police brutality, a half-mad addict who abandoned his art, a useless revolutionary according to his father, and a son whose pain his mother never fully understood until it was too late.
The answer to Hari’s tragic end lies not merely within his personal story, but within the larger narratives of systemic decay that treat the poor and the oppressed as disposable lives.
We hear about the plight of disabled quarry workers fighting for compensations, about police brutality that eventually fuels anguished Naxalite uprisings, and about protests against the privatisation of medical institutions that would make healthcare unaffordable for the working classes. I know it has become a cliché to say this now, but it remains disturbing how little has fundamentally changed for the nation.
We may live in an age of swanky malls and swankier smartphones, yet for the working class, the conditions often remain painfully similar.
There is a scene where Venu’s camera lingers on long queues of people waiting for their share of confiscated food, and I could not help recalling recent visuals of people lining up for LPG cylinders sold in black during the ongoing Middle East crisis.
Four decades gone; the governments have changed, the population attitudes towards the ruling system have changed, but the long queues for basics remain the constant, abhorrent feature never to be displaced.
Enduring Relevance While Placing Its Politics on Global Level
One could certainly argue that John Abraham’s leftist ideology fuels Amma Ariyan‘s rage against the system.
Yet, the film also makes it clear that he is no blind supporter of Communist politics either. At one point, it describes union leaders joining hands with politicians and police to protect factory owners to suppress the protesting workers.
Amma Ariyan also makes it pertinent to point out that this oppression is a global phenomenon. In doing so, it also reflects Kerala’s long-standing engagement with international politics, exemplified through a rehearsal sequence for a road play demanding freedom for the then-imprisoned South African leader Nelson Mandela.
We are shown newspaper clippings of atrocities and genocides carried across the globe, where it is always the poor and the downtrodden who bear the brunt of the cruelties.
Sadly, even in death, the poor are denied dignity.
The film’s most disturbing moment, for me, comes early on when Purushan first goes to identify Hari’s body in the mortuary. As the camera shifts towards Hari’s corpse, we briefly glimpse the bodies of two dead infants stored in the lower compartment. It lasts only a second, but the image haunts you long after the film ends.
Which is also exactly what Amma Ariyan does. The film intrudes your mind unexpectedly, forcing you to wrestle with its anguish and politics only after it is done, because while watching it, you are not merely following a story.
You are navigating through John Abraham’s rebellious refusal to let cinema behave according to accepted norms.
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
