The genre of dysfunctional-family-uniting-to-fight-villain contains two languages of storytelling. The first one is more primal. Consider Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke (1993), the popular Bollywood movie about a young hero (Aamir Khan) who reluctantly inherits custody of his deceased sister’s children. There’s generational tension between the kids and him; they don’t get along until a potential love interest bridges the gap and compels them to team up against a greedy Sindhi client. It’s more of a feel-good drama with a simple conflict and comic villain — a cartoon-crisis fixes a broken family. The second uses the genre as a cultural medium. Consider Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018), the award-winning Japanese film that investigates the meaning of family in modern civilisation and urban life. It revolves around a household of petty thieves who are soon revealed to be a “makeshift” family: disparate characters united by the trauma of being marginalized by a society that becomes the villain. The individuals are broken, but they hustle to form a family-shaped puzzle of rejected pieces.
The novelty of Kumbalangi Nights (2019) is that it adopts the best of both languages. The Malayalam movie combines the playful narrative tropes of a mainstream Hindi film with the sharp social identity of a Japanese drama. The protagonists are four brothers who share a strained relationship and a decayed home in the eponymous fishing village in Kerala: Saji (Soubin Shahir), Bonny (Sreenath Bhasi), Bobby (Shane Nigam) and Franky (Mathew Thomas). They are (mostly) related by blood, and the story allows them to reclaim the essence of being a makeshift family: disparate men welded by the trauma of being sidelined by a society that thrives on a traditional brand of masculinity. This society is symbolised by a single villain named Shammi (Fahadh Faasil), the entitled brother-in-law of the girlfriend (Anna Ben) that Bobby wants to marry. Shammi represents the average small-town striver who idolises the alpha males and casual sexism sold by Indian screens (“Raymond: The Complete Man” is his motto). He carries himself like the cocky breadwinner of a house comprising three women; his performance becomes his personality. The moustache-wielding barber enjoys the spectacle of control in a space that makes him feel like a benevolent king in charge of obligated subjects.
The ‘tragedy’ of the four brothers is that they are nothing like him. Each of them is an outcast composed of alt-masculine journeys and softboi traits. Saji, the eldest, is mentally unstable enough to seek therapy at one point; he aches to let it all out and shed years of tears after reaching a new nadir. The mute Bonny stays away and uses his silence as a manner of aura and manliness — until he doesn’t; he falls for an American tourist and summons a tenderness that isn’t normal for lovers of his oeuvre. Bobby is a weed-smoking wastrel who spends his days dozing by the sea, until love alters the DNA of his dimpled charisma. The arrival of Baby in his life humbles him and makes him less of a conventional stoner-loner; he even requests his brothers to put on the front of a respectable family to ask her hand in marriage. He starts out by asking for their support in the way some travellers file their tax returns to apply for a foreign visa — only to discover that paying tax was important on its own all along. The youngest, Franky, returns from college for his summer holidays to the rickety riverside house. You’d think he would be the pampered brat, but he’s the responsible and mature one: cooking, cleaning, fishing, rolling his eyes at the juvenile fights between Saji and Bobby.
The brothers might be introduced as orthodox prototypes of boys and men, but their transformation — their divergence from a more patriarchal logo of toxicity — is what defines the film’s genre duality. The cliches are baked into a storyline that critiques a broader heritage of cliches. The brothers learn to own their makeshift-ness to survive the wrath of Shammi, a nemesis whose curated masculinity is reframed as a sickness. He dismisses the brothers’ defects from the higher moral ground of a man who behaves like a male saviour desperate to transcend the gaze of his diminutive stature. Comic villain? Yes, but also a guy pressured by society to romanticise comic villains without realising it. A crisis curing a leaky family? Yes, but also a script that seamlessly passes the baton of spotlight from one brother to another (opening with Frankie and closing with everyone), until all their main-character energies converge in pursuit of a conflict that’s bigger than them.
The synergy between the progressive themes and the intuitive craft — where the village of Kumbalangi remains immersive and atmospheric without exoticising itself — shapes the designer realism of the film. It democratises the dysfunctionality at hand and encourages the viewer, regardless of origin, to see themselves in the cemented cracks of the family rather than through the lens of a society that judges these cracks. I remember watching the film for the first time and imagining the kind of fractured unity my separated parents would display if I were to need them for my wedding. It reminds me of the week they had to play the role of senior guardians and immediate family to her brother for his wedding: doing all the paperwork, participating in rituals, socialising with guests, organising the venue. I sat there as a teenager, the ‘Frankie’ of the lot, wondering if those strangers knew our truth. I wondered if one of the bride’s regressive siblings would make a scene and forbid the marriage if they found out. Would it have fixed us? I’m not sure. Do we need to be functional to be accepted? I should hope not. After all, one family’s scars are another’s ink marks of individualism.