Sharan Venugopal on 'Narayaneente Moonnaanmakkal' and Bringing Personal Memories to Life

“It’s been overwhelming,” says director Sharan Venugopal about the two days that followed the premiere of his debut film Narayaneente Moonnaanmakkal ( 2025) on Amazon Prime Video. “Even those who watched the film during its limited theatrical release, told me about the kind of love it would get once it was out on OTT. The messages have only reiterated that. The film has resonated with people at a personal level; it made me realise that it’s for this feeling that we make films.”

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Narayaneente Moonnaanmakkal (The Three Sons of Narayani) is a slow-burn character study about a dysfunctional joint family during a particularly tense crisis. It’s a family reunion of sorts that begins when the youngest of the three sons (played by Suraj Venjaramoodu) returns home from the UK to see his mother for the last time. After having removed her from life support, the three brothers wait patiently to bid goodbye to their mother, even as ghosts from the past return to haunt the family.

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It’s an idea Venugopal started working on as early as 2018. As a student of direction at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute (SRFTI), the ideas and the characters of Narayaneente Moonnaanmakkal were those he kept going back to. “It’s not just the people; the setting, the house and even the town of Koyilandi was very familiar to me. These are straight from my childhood... factors that amused me long before I thought of becoming a filmmaker.”

This includes the memories of a man that Venugopal based the character played by Joju George on. “But while writing, it wasn't not so such about the events the man lived through, that made it to my script. I was familiar with him, but I didn’t have the opportunity to understand him. The writing then became a process to crack the question about who he was and the reason he became this way.”

Even though that particular character remained unchanged during the filming process, what surprised Venugopal was how he was able to discover a lot more about the other characters in the film. “Like Nikhil (Thomas Mathew) and Athira (Garggi Ananthan). They kept evolving as we kept shooting.” You get a sense of their interiority from their conversations that go from surface-level small talk between strangers, to meaningful outpourings that work like catharsis for both.

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“I feel all my films aim to explore the different dynamics within complex interpersonal relationships. They must be written organically and with honesty, but I believe that even day-to-day interactions that one may call banal come with an element of tension that’s rich for cinema.”

Venugopal says that he knew that the setting of the film would make it serious, but he didn’t want to overdo it. “I wanted it to be in the tone of a dark comedy. Even in that intense scene set towards the end when Suraj’s character spends time alone with his mother, I wanted it to end on a lighter note. My characters are already in a vulnerable situation, so I didn’t want to do more just the drama.”

But the richness in his writing is evident because Venugopal feels he looks, “inwards for ideas.” “This isn’t just about the part wherein I look at my own life to come up with characters. Let’s say there was a situation in my life that I keep thinking about, wondering if I should have behaved differently. I then sit down and start writing about how things would have been; that’s probably my way of coming out of that situation.”

The process of shooting Narayaneente Moonnaanmakkal gave Venugopal an experience that was as fruitful as the process of writing it. As a first-time filmmaker, this experience may have been daunting and exciting in equal measure, but Venugopal speaks about what he discovered about himself, “Before we shoot, we feel we can plan for everything. We can imagine the colour of the walls to be green and for the bed sheets to be a shade of brown. We can even create this look either on a storyboard or with 3D graphics."

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“But you cannot prepare for the moments when you see your characters come alive. Something that was on my mind for so many years suddenly felt like they were right in front of my eyes. There were so many moments during Narayaneente Moonnaanmakkal when I felt awestruck at the way my actors were bringing these people to life. It was so much more than I could have imagined," he concludes.