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Spoiler warning: This article discusses major plot points from ‘It’s a Medical Miracle’.
In popular cinema, the male body is almost exclusively built as an instrument of hyper-action, unchecked power, or comically pathetic vulnerability. When it suffers, it suffers heroically — bruised and bleeding, but fundamentally unbroken. We know how to film a man being beaten, bloodied, or even killed. Cinematography has spent decades perfecting the art of masculine martyrdom. What Indian cinema rarely knows how to do is hold space for the male body when it is stripped of its authority and becomes the site of sexual violence.
In Shyamin Gireesh’s fantasy thriller It’s a Medical Miracle (2026), starring Sangeeth Prathap and Sharaf U Dheen, the narrative offers a rare, horrifying departure from this norm. The premise begins as a quirky fantasy setup: Ruben (Sangeeth Prathap) wakes from brain death with extreme, painful hyperacusis, that is, amplified hearing that turns ambient noise into physical agony. But the story quickly darkens through its antagonist, Sooraj, a sociopathic police officer played by Sharaf U Dheen.
Sooraj’s defining trait is a fragile, pathological ego. His retaliation is never a simple assault, but a calculated effort to strip his victims of whatever gives them dignity or joy — burning a man’s parrots, killing a woman’s cat, or kidnapping a child whose father mocked his sexual prowess.
When Ruben and the woman he is courting, Susanna – a nurse who once cared for him during his treatment – inadvertently offend the police officer’s paranoia, and an egg she playfully throws lands on his face, his bruised vanity demands absolute, humiliating subjugation.
The retribution is a meticulously orchestrated act of sexual violence.
The scene is horrifying not because it relies on explicit, sensationalised gore, but because of how it frames power and captures the psychological horror of complete helplessness. Shot from an uncomfortable, claustrophobic vantage point, the sequence forces the audience into a state of edge-of-the-seat discomfort, just wanting to disappear, as the act is explicitly designed to annihilate Ruben's agency.
To the film’s credit, the director handles this sequence with restraint, avoiding gratuitous visual repetition or cheap shock value. Instead, the film focuses on the psychological aftermath: the crushing shame, the immediate withdrawal, the refusal to seek medical help or contact the police, and the survivor’s utter inability to look his partner in the eye.
In one scene, the film also captures the horror of somatic memory, about how trauma is stored in the physical body, causing involuntary bodily reactions long before the mind consciously processes the memory.
Yet, It’s a Medical Miracle also exposes the deep, frustrating limitations of our cinematic vocabulary.
First, there is the glaring absence of language. Throughout the film, the assault is never named as rape or sexual violence. It is treated as an unnamed, unspeakable tragedy, a silence that reflects real-world societal taboos in which male survivors are denied even the vocabulary to articulate their violation.
Second, while the film lays the groundwork for a profound exploration of assault and its aftermath, it abruptly abandons that potential in favour of a conventional revenge plot. Ruben moves from a traumatised survivor to a brave avenger, redirecting the narrative into the familiar, safe territory of masculine retribution.
This tendency to resolve sexual violence through individual vigilantism rather than institutional or systemic discourse is a recurring trope across Indian cinema.
We have seen similar themes of male custodial sexual abuse and torture in films such as Jai Bhim (2021) and the raw brutality of Visaranai (2015), where sexualised violence by law enforcement is used to break the human spirit. Even when cinema has touched upon male sexual trauma, it has rarely allowed an adult male hero to exist as a surviving victim without immediately neutralising that vulnerability with physical dominance or murder.
It's a Medical Miracle had the rare opportunity to remain in that uncomfortable space, but chose the commercial relief of an action climax instead.
The most telling detail, however, lies in how the film’s audience interacts with the broader ecosystem of violence it portrays. Throughout the narrative, a couple of scenes feature casual cruelty punctuated by blatantly misogynistic punchlines, moments that were met with laughter and applause by at least a section of the audience.
That theatre reaction is the entire problem in microcosm. The cultural mindset that chuckles at casual, everyday misogyny in one scene is part of the same ecosystem that enforces rigid, shameful silence around sexual violence against men in the next.
Patriarchy is often misunderstood as merely a conflict between men and women. In reality, it is an overarching hierarchical system of power built on sexist control. It demands that power be maintained through dominance and decrees that vulnerability is an inherent flaw.
It’s a Medical Miracle deserves acknowledgment for portraying the sheer, unvarnished enormity of male sexual violence without reducing it to a joke or an glossed-over plot point. But as long as our stories treat sexual trauma merely as a setup for a final-act showdown, Indian cinema will continue to miss the chance to spark the real, structural discourse we desperately need.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
