*Spoilers for the film ahead*
Abhinav Sundar Nayak’s debut Mukundan Unni Associates (2022) arrived with considerable critical goodwill. The film's dark humour and its unflinching portrait of a lawyer, played by Vineeth Sreenivasan, willing to cross every moral line for professional success, felt fresh and even audacious. Audiences and critics read it as dark humour. With his second film, Mollywood Times, starring Naslen as filmmaker Vineeth Madhav, that reading invites a second look. The question is no longer whether these films carry a worldview, but what the worldview keeps returning to.
Mollywood Times opens with two children drawn to the same book, a connection that resurfaces in their adult lives and becomes the film’s central metaphor — truth as the thing humans fear more than ghosts, death, or god. The book frames a man who failed to fight destiny. It's an evocative premise. But what the film does with that premise is where the trouble begins.
The recurring statement
Across both films, the same ideas resurface: society is irredeemably corrupt, goodness is punished, and survival belongs only to those willing to become what they claim to oppose.
In Mukundan Unni Associates, advocate Mukundan Unni (Vineeth Sreenivasan) succeeds by shedding every ethical constraint. Filmmaker Arjun Haridas in Mollywood Times follows a similar arc. In both films, those who stand for ethics fail against a system that is corrupted. Mollywood Times takes this further by extending these questions into ideas of talent, recognition, and merit.
The protagonists who hold onto integrity fail, not as tragedy, not as critique, but as confirmation of a worldview. Evil wins. That is the conclusion both films appear to leave the audience with.
Abhinav opened Mukundan Unni Associates by announcing, with deliberate provocation, that he owes thanks to no one. At the time, it read as a character choice, a tonal declaration consistent with the film's dark register. Revisited after Mollywood Times, it reads differently — less like an isolated narrative device and more like a directorial statement.
The constant cursing of society as a place where nothing good survives is no longer just dark humour. It is a worldview, and worldviews have politics.
Where the politics become specific
The character of Suji, Vineeth Madhav's childhood friend from a marginalised caste background, is where the film's political orientation becomes explicit.
Suji is not introduced as someone lacking in ability. He is a student of above-average academic merit. Yet two distinct moments in the film reduce him entirely to his caste identity. First, his own parents point to Vineeth and say he (Suji) will secure a seat regardless of how little he studies — because of his caste.
The line returns later, almost verbatim, at an internet café when the two go to check exam results. A random person comments to him that he will get a seat anyway because of his caste, in the very exam results where he scored more than 80%, which was considerably higher than Vineeth’s score. Twice, the same line. The film does not appear to depict it merely to show how prejudice operates. It repeats as if it were a given.
Suji's arc continues: he gets into medical college, is expelled following a conflict, and joins Vineeth's filmmaking team as an assistant director. Later, the film presents him as unable to diagnose a death, played for comedy. This would read as an innocent character detail if the film had not already so carefully constructed his caste identity as the explanatory frame for everything around him. In this context, it does not land as a comedy. It lands as confirmation.
Suji later betrays Vineeth for personal gain and receives an award for a film that, as the critic played by Rajesh Madhavan explicitly states, is recognised not on merit but because of the director's underprivileged background.
Immediately after the award, Suji feels the insecurity he has carried his whole life: that his talent was never what was recognised, only his identity. The film presents this as his tragedy. But it has spent its entire runtime building the scaffolding for that insecurity to feel justified.
The character of Arjun Haridas runs parallel. Also from an underprivileged background, Arjun's first public moment is a stage speech in which he uses that background to justify valuing his mediocre work over Vineeth Madhav's talent when he receives the first prize and Vineeth gets second.
Later, the film makes a striking visual choice, as both Arjun and Vineeth appear in the same outfit. Vineeth himself puts it this way: Arjun has appropriated his style, his identity, and his aesthetic in his work, while the film shows Arjun explicitly mimicking Vineeth’s outfit.
In this reading, the film frames a person from an underprivileged background as someone who does not develop an original artistic voice but absorbs and hijacks another. Taken together with the Suji arc, the film does not tell two separate stories. It appears to make a single, consistent argument — that recognition given to those from underprivileged backgrounds comes at the cost of those with genuine merit, rather than being earned independently.
This framing of talent from an underprivileged background, along with this act of identity adaptation, exposes the deeper anxiety about recognition and merit that runs through the film.
This is a precise ideological argument, and it is not a new one. It is, in fact, one of the oldest arguments deployed against caste reservation: that reservation reduces a person to their caste, that recognition given to underprivileged communities is merit-blind, that the system itself is biased. The film does not interrogate this argument. It dramatises it, repeats it, and allows it to stand without complication.
A filmmaker could legitimately place casteist rhetoric in a character's mouth as a form of critique, showing how such thinking operates, how it follows a person throughout their life, and how it wounds. Depicting an argument is not the same as endorsing it.
But for that reading to hold, the film must do something with it. It must frame, complicate, or ultimately challenge the argument it stages.
Mollywood Times does not. Suji's and Arjun's stories are used to illustrate the film’s broader thesis that in an unfair world, even merit goes unrecognised. In doing so, it inadvertently legitimises the very logic it appears to describe.
The genetics of goodness
There is a detail in Mollywood Times that makes the film's politics even harder to set aside.
Vineeth Madhav's grandfather repeatedly discourages him throughout his teenage years from engaging with the compromised world around him. Vineeth initially reads this as doubt about his talent. But the film eventually reveals the grandfather meant something else: that their family lacks the genetics to survive in spaces where bias and tactics determine recognition over merit. That their moral character is not chosen. It is inherited.
Vineeth Madhav accepts and repeats this narrative, and the film presents it as wisdom.
This is one of the most revealing moments in the film. If Vineeth's goodness is genetic, the implication runs both ways — those who succeed through compromise or by leveraging identity over merit are also, in some sense, wired that way. Morality becomes biology. And biology, in a film already so invested in who deserves recognition, carries a caste logic whether it intends to or not.
The question the films don’t ask
Naslen’s Vineeth Madhav raises the question of greatness at many points, measuring his own talent against that standard. But the film conflates talent with greatness, which are not the same thing.
Greatness, as it has been understood across literary and artistic traditions, is not the possession of a successful formula. It is the capacity to transcend its moment, and to disturb, illuminate, and remain alive across time. Talent produces, while greatness provokes reckoning.
The confusion matters here because it connects directly to what the film is ultimately about: recognition, and who gets to be seen as deserving it. Greatness, too, is shaped by access, opportunity, timing, and the structures that decide whose work receives visibility. A film genuinely interested in that question would have to sit with it honestly.
Mollywood Times instead uses Vineeth Madhav's belief in his own greatness to frame the recognition given to others as theft. The question the film never asks is the one that would have made it great: not who stole what from whom, but what kind of world decides who gets to be seen at all.
This raises the broader question of whether a film, even if its commercially successful or critically acclaimed film, can truly be considered a great work of art if it cannot transcend time or empathise with centuries of oppression, abuse, and dismantling. It risks reducing representation and social recognition to a superficial question of individual merit, portraying the underprivileged as lacking talent or ability in creative and professional spaces, and framing them as responsible for their own exclusion rather than as people navigating systems historically designed against them.
Abhinav is clearly a filmmaker of real instinct. The novelty of Mukundan Unni Associates was not imagined. But two films that repeatedly return to the same moral questions, embed specific and historically loaded narratives about caste and merit without interrogating them, and frame an irredeemably corrupt society as simply the truth of the world, are not outside politics.
They are inside them, whether or not that was the intention.
The darkness in these films is not the problem. The unexamined confidence behind it is.
Arya AT is a passionate writer and translator. A pessimist by intellect, yet an optimist by will, she clings to words as both refuge and rebellion.
Views expressed are the author’s own.