TW: Mentions of suicide, sexual assault, Islamophobia
There is a moment in The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond when a police officer, surveying a tonsured woman hanging from the ceiling, asks the most pressing question the film can think of: “Why did she cut her hair? What message did she want to give?”
It may come across as an absurd moment. By then, the film has already spent over two hours telling us exactly how she ended up here, who wronged her, who enabled it, and which community must be blamed. But that small, absurd question captures the instinct driving The Kerala Story 2, which is its inability to stop explaining, exaggerating, and hammering its conclusions home, even after they have been made painfully clear.
If Sudipto Sen’s The Kerala Story (2023) was propaganda that barely masqueraded as social concern, its sequel drops the disguise entirely. Directed this time by Kamakhya Narayan Singh and produced, once again, by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, The Kerala Story 2 is not interested in inquiry or complexity. It wants certainty. It wants fear. And above all, it wants Hindus to stop asking questions and start closing ranks.
Like its predecessor, the film begins with the ritual disclaimer — “inspired by true events”, some elements fictionalised — before immediately plunging into a montage of horror: a woman hanging in Kochi, another jumping off a balcony in Gwalior, a severed hand discovered in Jodhpur. Places are scattered across the map, but the message is singular and blunt. The film may be named The ‘Kerala’ Story, but this is not just about Kerala (“though vilify the state, it certainly does”). This is about Hindu women everywhere. And Islam, everywhere else.
Across its length, the film cycles through a set of stories involving Hindu women from different parts of the country who enter relationships with Muslim men, and are subsequently subjected to conversion, confinement, sexual violence, and death. These narratives are presented not as exceptions, but as patterns, all variations of the same underlying threat.
The film insists, repeatedly and defensively, that such cases do happen. And yes, crimes involving interfaith relationships, coercion, trafficking, and sexual violence exist. The problem is not that the film acknowledges them. The problem is how it assembles them into a single, seamless conspiracy, exaggerating them into the realm of caricature, and pinning them onto one community as civilisational intent.
Kerala, too, is reduced to caricature. Hindu families in Kochi speak fluent, earnest Hindi, occasionally sprinkling Malayalam words like garnish, to signal authenticity, I guess. At one point, the mother calls the daughter “achante chamchi” — an unreal mix of Malayalam and Hindi that, to Malayali ears, sounds ridiculous. The linguistic absurdity would be funny if it weren’t so revealing. This Kerala is not meant to resemble a lived place. It exists only as a cautionary fantasy, shaped less by reality than by the anxieties of the Sangh imagination.
Surekha Nair, the film’s Malayali protagonist, is the sequel’s upgraded version of Shalini Unnikrishnan from Thiruvananthapuram. She is a “secular liberal woman,” not as naive as the mullapoo-wearing village girl Shalini, but doomed all the same. Surekha prefers a live-in relationship, uses words like “Islamophobia”, accuses her “secular liberal” father of disappointing her by acting like a “kattar Hindu”, and throws his own liberal upbringing back at him. The film ensures we know, from the outset, that these arguments are fatal flaws. We are never allowed to consider that she might be articulating something recognisable, even reasonable. We already know where she ends up.
This is a recurring strategy across the film’s three central women. Any articulation of autonomy, privacy, or choice is framed not as agency, but as evidence of parental failure. The message is unmistakable: if Hindu parents had been stricter, more religious, less liberal, none of this would have happened.
The film is also obsessed with sex — not desire, but punishment through sex.
Of the three relationships it centres, the only one that includes a consensual makeout scene is between Divya, a 16-year-old girl in Rajasthan, and her Muslim boyfriend. That she is also the only minor among the three women is unlikely to be incidental. Divya dances, makes reels, argues with her parents about privacy, and is swiftly disciplined by the narrative for it.
Neha, a Dalit javelin thrower in Gwalior, dreams of a sporting career and believes in a man who promises her support. Surekha believes she can separate love from religion. All three are corrected through violence.
And this is where satire has to stop, because the film does not merely depict brutality, it dwells and thrives on it. It lingers on forced conversions, on a woman raped on her wedding night by a cleric so her husband can receive the “full payment” for marrying her, on her subsequent confinement in what is effectively a prostitution racket, tied to a bed while men come and go.
Sexual violence here is blatantly weaponised, the women’s trauma used as narrative leverage. Muslim men are not just violent, they are also organised, remunerated, and bureaucratic about it.
Midway through the film, subtlety is formally abandoned. A character named Salim — who is introduced as a “liberal, progressive journalist” — prays before what is essentially a vision board of Ghazwa-e-Hind 2047. He discusses targets, data, and timelines with casual efficiency, referring to Hindu women as “potential family trees”.
This is where the film stops pretending it is warning viewers about crime and begins openly rehearsing demographic paranoia. Muslims are no longer individuals, they are an international syndicate, always presented on screen with dramatic evil music in the background. Conversion, for all Muslims, the film says, is civilisational warfare, while love is merely the tactic.
To ensure there is no confusion, the film repeatedly tells us that secularism enabled all this. Constitutional rights are not safeguards but loopholes. Courts are obstacles. Laws protecting adult choice are indulgences. The solution, implied throughout and enacted in the end, is force.
That force arrives in the film’s final act, which abandons even the veneer of cinema and becomes spectacle. Bulldozers roll in. “Har Har Mahadev” and “Hey Shambho” blare. The homes of the cruel Muslim perpetrators are razed. Men are beaten. A maulvi is warned over the phone to “change your ways, because people are waking up”. The song in the background invokes Hindu gods, kings, and even Guru Gobind Singh and asks, “Till when should we be the only ones upholding fraternity?”
It is a clear invocation, even the aestheticisation, of what has come to be known as “bulldozer justice” — the extrajudicial demolition of homes, overwhelmingly belonging to Muslims, presented in public discourse as instant punishment. The film does not ask who decides guilt or why entire families are punished. It aestheticises the destruction, lingering on collapsing walls with the same satisfaction it earlier reserved for women’s suffering.
Earlier, the film also invokes the Shraddha Walker murder case — a real, brutal instance of intimate partner violence — not to reflect on gendered violence or systemic failure, but to fold it into its broader warning about Muslim men and interfaith relationships.
And lest there be any doubt about what lesson Hindu women are meant to take from all this, Surekha’s suicide note spells it out: her death is her fault. Loving across religion was her mistake. Her “cultural DNA” is Hindu. She hopes to be reborn Hindu. Her parents must tell her story to other girls — as a warning.
The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond is not afraid of Islam, which is a mere caricature of evil for the makers. What it is afraid of is women choosing. It is afraid of caste boundaries blurring, of secular law and any ambiguity that allows coexistence. Most of all, it is afraid of a world where violence is recognised as violence, and not just outsourced to a religion for narrative convenience.
This is not a film that “raises questions”. It supplies answers loudly, crudely, and with alarming confidence. And in doing so, it goes far beyond bad faith cinema. It becomes a recruitment pitch for violence.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.