The Malayalam film Kishkindha Kaandam, directed by Dinjith Ayyathan, hit theaters on September 12, 2024, and quickly became a box office success, earning over ₹70 crore on a modest ₹7 crore budget. With a stellar cast including Asif Ali, Aparna Balamurali, and Vijayaraghavan, this movie has now begun streaming on OTT platform Disney plus Hotstar. Let’s dive into the Kishkindha Kaandam Movie Review to see what makes it stand out.

Plot Overview
Set in a village bordering a forest, the story revolves around Appu Pillai (Vijayaraghavan), a retired army officer living with his son Ajay Chandra (Asif Ali), daughter-in-law Praveena (Vaishnavi Raj), and grandson Chachu (Aarav). Tragedy strikes when Praveena passes away, and Chachu mysteriously disappears.

While the investigation into Chachu’s disappearance forms a crucial part of the narrative, the police station instructs Appu to surrender his licensed gun due to the upcoming elections. However, the gun has been missing for a long time, complicating matters further. The police warn that even a single missing bullet could lead to serious consequences.

As Ajay remarries Aparna (Aparna Balamurali), she moves into the family home and learns that Appu suffers from memory loss. Aparna grows suspicious of Appu’s behavior, particularly his reluctance to let anyone enter his room and his habit of burning items in a secluded area. Her investigation into Chachu’s disappearance and the missing gun forms the crux of the film.

Analysis
Kishkindha Kaandam revolves around three key characters: the father, the son, and the daughter-in-law. Aparna’s desire to find Chachu and bring happiness back to her family drives the first half of the movie. As she uncovers clues linking Appu to Chachu’s disappearance and the missing gun, the tension escalates in the second half.

The narrative cleverly intertwines memory loss, a missing gun, and a child’s disappearance, keeping the audience guessing until the very end. The film’s strength lies in its minimalist approach, focusing on a small cast and localized settings. The title, Kishkindha Kaandam, reflects the village’s unique connection to monkeys, adding a symbolic layer to the plot.

Director Dinjith Ayyathan skillfully maintains suspense without relying on exaggerated drama, keeping the story grounded in realism. This approach makes the twists and turns feel natural and engaging.

Performances
Vijayaraghavan delivers a standout performance as the enigmatic and suspicious Appu Pillai. His portrayal of a man struggling with memory loss while harboring secrets is both compelling and nuanced. Asif Ali shines as Ajay, caught between family responsibilities and professional duties. Aparna Balamurali impresses with her natural acting, convincingly portraying a new bride navigating the complexities of her new family while trying to uncover the truth.

Technical Aspects
Cinematography: Ramesh’s visuals beautifully capture the lush, forested village, enhancing the story’s atmosphere.
Music: Mujeeb Majeed’s haunting background score elevates the suspense.
Editing: Suraj’s crisp editing ensures a tight narrative, particularly in the second half.
Malayalam cinema continues its tradition of seamlessly integrating stories with authentic locations, making the events on screen feel believable and immersive.

Verdict
Kishkindha Kaandam is a captivating mystery thriller with strong performances, a well-crafted screenplay, and stunning visuals. It’s a testament to the power of storytelling and naturalistic filmmaking. This is a movie that can be enjoyed with the whole family.

Kelsey Mann was scanning some old photos when he came to a series of pictures from his childhood birthdays and was struck by what he saw.

“I was 5, and it’s my birthday, and I’m sitting there in front of my cake … I think it was the smile and the joy on my face that made me stop,” says the director of “Inside Out 2.” “I’m like, ‘Wow, I am really enjoying the hell out of this moment.’ Then I turned 8, and my smile went down. I turned 11; it went down even further. Then 13, and I’m just staring at this cake, wishing I was anywhere but there.

“So I thought, ‘What the hell happened?’ ”

“Inside Out” had been a huge hit for Pixar in 2015. The comedy about 11-year-old Riley’s emotions, led by Joy, struggling to find balance within her grossed more than $850 million and won the animated feature Oscar. Naturally, with a sequel in mind, the studio’s writers had been continuing to learn how the mind works.

“A lot of us [were] doing the research of what goes on in the brain — suddenly, I — ‘Oh, I understand what I was doing,’ ” Mann says of the change in his photos. “This is the time when you become really self-conscious and compare yourself to others. … I hated the attention. I just wanted it to be over. So that feeling of not feeling good enough is where a lot of this began.”

“Welcome to Pixar,” says “Inside Out 2” co-writer Dave Holstein, to laughter from Mann and co-writer Meg LeFauve, over a video chat. “We start at the emotional core and we think, ‘What’s the saddest possible thing?’ ”

They laugh again, but this is the studio that traumatized us all with the opening sequence of “Up.” And for “Inside Out 2” — also nominally a comedy — they were steeped in one of the most terrifying circumstances: puberty. In the sequel, now-13-year-old Riley is doing great, playing hockey with good friends. Her now-united emotions, led by Joy (voiced again by Amy Poehler), are nurturing her developing Sense of Self. Then a whole squad of new emotions, powered by the frantic energy of Anxiety (Maya Hawke), arrives and throws everything off kilter.

Holstein says, “When Kelsey was discussing that seed of this idea, I think the question that came up for me was, ‘What happens to joy as we get older?’ ”

LeFauve says, “Perfectionism and anxiety taking over at that age is something that we could all relate to … [but] it also had to be fun. You want to be true and authentic to the research and human beings,” she says of wanting the film to be relevant to teenage girls like the ones in the story.

But with all the input from different places and the different plot threads involving Riley’s struggles to fit in at hockey camp, Anxiety’s misguided attempts to help, exiled Joy’s quest to return and restore balance and all the “balls in the air” and “three-dimensional chess,” as LeFauve puts it, Mann would keep coming back to the central idea: “ ‘What’s the story? This is about Joy.’ ”

“There’s a real ‘Inception’ quality to writing an emotional arc for an emotion inside someone else’s head while thinking about it in your head,” Holstein says with a chuckle. “So it is like three-dimensional chess, but played on a Chinese checkerboard during a game of Clue inside a dishwasher.

“The first movie, to me, was Joy discovering the power of Sadness,” Holstein adds. “And this movie, for me, had to be Joy discovering the power of Joy.”

They didn’t have to go far to find subjects for research. During COVID-19 closures, they got to see kids up close every day at home. But LeFauve didn’t even have to look that far to get started.

“I suffered from anxiety as a teenage girl,” she says. “So I was very much drawing from my own experience and how isolating that can be, especially in all the social things going on. As an adult, I found the solution of asking Anxiety to take a seat and to say, ‘I’m not going to die.’ ‘Give her a job.’ I do want teenagers to know you can ask anxiety to take a seat. It really does work. Give her a job. She needs a job. It’s not a piece of yourself you can cut out or get rid of. When I have my anxiety, I say, first, “Thank you. I know you’re trying to protect me.” She’s a part of me. She’s a part I need, but you can take a seat. I’m OK.”

LeFauve had other personal experience to rely on as well. “I have a son who has anxiety, so he would constantly be telling me about the projections of the future, and ‘What if?’ It helped to give him the clarity of, ‘But is that happening?’ It’s what Joy is saying in that sequence. So a lot of the sequences came from my experience as an anxious teen and adult and as a mom with an anxious teen.”

Often, the adults learned from the kids. Mann says his daughter’s leanings toward perfectionism have caused her some anxiety.

“A lot of what my daughter has been able to learn, I’ve been able to learn from and put in the movie — the whole panic-attack scene at the end,” he says. “[Riley’s] having one and starts to come down out of it; she’s using her senses in order to ground herself in the present. … It’s a technique I learned through my daughter.”

Holstein, who says he had a speech impediment as a boy, says that multiplicity of perspectives was key to the film’s success (“Inside Out 2” is the highest-grossing animated film ever, with nearly $1.7 billion worldwide, and holds a 90 positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes): “It works on two eyelines. The kid in me wanted to tell the story of that stuttering kid who got hold of his anxiety and the adult in me wanted to tell the story of not wanting to see the joy leave my 7-year-old son’s face after every birthday cake.”

Andrew Stevens pays loving but not hagiographic tribute to his late mother, famed actress Stella Stevens, in his documentary recently showcased at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. The film convincingly makes the case that its subject, best known for her performances in such pictures as The Poseidon Adventure and The Nutty Professor, is severely underrated, both as an actress and social activist. Stella Stevens: The Last Starlet aims to rectify that perception and, thanks to numerous clips of her work and effusive commentary by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Vivica A. Fox, it succeeds beautifully.

The filmmaker (who appears frequently) admits that his relationship with his mother was rocky, to say the least, in the early years. Born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, Stevens got married at age 16 and had Andrew, her first and only child, six months later. The marriage soon dissolved, and when she moved to Hollywood to pursue an acting career, she took Andrew to California with her illegally. His father and grandfather later showed up and spirited him away, resulting in an ugly custody battle and Andrew not having a real relationship with his mother until he turned 16.

Stevens was soon signed to 20th Century Fox, where she was groomed to be a starlet in the mold of Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren. Her sexpot image was further confirmed when she appeared as a Playboy centerfold, though she had desperately tried to purchase the nude images back from Hugh Hefner, who refused.

Her career quickly took off thanks to such films as Li’l Abner, in which she played the wonderfully named “Appasionata Von Climax,” and the musical Say One for Me with Bing Crosby, for which she received a Golden Globe award for New Star of the Year.

“Some of the most fun parts I’ve played are nymphomaniacs,” Stevens amusingly points out in one of many interviews featured here. Some of them are shown via archival clips from various talk show appearances, while others are recreated using a lookalike actress (Lindsie Kongsore). While the device is jarring at first, it admittedly breathes life into Stevens’ words. But the filmmaker gets too carried away with it at times, as when he unnecessarily uses an actor to play a film critic reading an excerpt from a review.

There are plenty of juicy anecdotes and revelations in the documentary, one of the most priceless being Stevens’ account of co-star Bobby Darin getting a much noticeable erection while they shot a kissing scene. She also reveals that she had no desire to appear with Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls! and only agreed to do it after she was promised that she would get to play opposite Montgomery Clift in her next film. The Clift project never materialized, and she could never bring herself to watch the Presley one.

We learn of her many romances, including an affair with the notorious and very much married Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak and a lengthy relationship with actor Skip Ward, who took financial advantage of her and was frequently unfaithful.

The documentary makes a strong case for Stevens’ talent — particularly her formidable comic chops, as illustrated in numerous clips of her work, including from an episode of Bonanza for which she won acclaim. She held her own opposite Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor and sparkled in the old-fashioned comedy How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life opposite Dean Martin, with whom she had previously appeared in the Matt Helm spy spoof The Silencers. She received critical acclaim for her exuberant turn in Sam Peckinpah’s 1970 The Ballad of Cable Hogue, though the film was a flop. When she did appear in hits, such as the hugely popular disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure, it didn’t give her career much traction.  

She later became an iconic figure for Black audiences, thanks to her groundbreaking interracial love scene with Jim Brown in the blaxploitation hit Slaughter and her campy villainous turn in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold. But what she really wanted to do, as they say, was direct. She finally got her chance in 1989 with an indie feature called The Ranch, starring her son Andrew (he later returned the favor, directing her in the 1991 B-movie The Terror Within II), and a feminist-themed documentary, The American Heroine, which was never released.

Besides the ample clips from her roles and television appearances, the documentary includes fascinating home movies, personal photographs, and insightful commentary from various figures including film historians Leonard Maltin and Courtney Joyner. But it’s Tarantino who unsurprisingly proves the highlight, articulately gushing about Stevens’ performances with the passion of a true fan. (Introducing The Last Starlet at the festival, Andrew admitted that he basically handed the ball to Tarantino and let him run with it.)

While Stevens’ big-screen career eventually fizzled, she never stopped working, appearing in dozens of direct-to-video movies and TV series until her final appearance in something called Megaconda in 2010. “If the idea of being an actress is to work, she worked. She worked a lot,” Tarantino points out.

Her final days were sad ones, as she slowly succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease until her death at 84 in 2023. Much to the consternation of her son and her many fans, she was not included in the Academy Awards’ annual “In Memoriam” segment and never received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The latter is a rebuff that should be corrected — especially if Stella Stevens: The Last Starlet gets the exposure it deserves.