In Conversation With Team 'Lokah': Kalyani Priyadarshan, Dulquer Salmaan and Dominic Arun Decode Film's Dizzying Success

When Kalyani Priyadarshan says that she hasn’t yet fathomed the enormity of Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra’s success, she isn’t joking. The superhero movie has amassed a sum somewhere between ₹250 crore and ₹260 crore, making it the highest-grossing Malayalam movie of all time. What’s equally amusing is that this feat was achieved in a female-led action comedy that borrows heavily from Kerala’s centuries’ old folklore. It ranks as the sixth-highest grossing Indian movie of the year and is expected to end its run as the second-highest grossing woman-led Indian movie of all time, behind 2023’s The Kerala Story.

But as The Hollywood Reporter India meets Priyadarshan for a photoshoot and an interview right after, two weeks after the film’s release, she appears to not have had the time to recalibrate herself to these dizzying new heights of stardom. “I’m not sure if it’s my imposter syndrome talking but it just hasn’t sunk in… it all feels surreal,” she says, when asked about how life-changing these days have been.

As she walks from one lighting set-up to another during this photoshoot, one catches her looking surprised as the crew stands up in respect. She may have had hits in three languages before this (Varane Avashyamund in Malayalam, Maanaadu in Tamil and Hello! in Telugu) but Lokah is not the kind of success that happens too often in one’s career. Its producer and a legit superstar in his own right, Dulquer Salmaan, too hasn’t yet been able to wrap his head around it.

The ₹30 Crore Gamble

“I haven’t seen this kind of success as an actor, let alone producer,” he admits as he settles down for a chat. In the weeks leading up to the release, he had termed Lokah, “a very expensive indie”. For all the talk of the film’s significant return on investment that has now become a hot topic across the country, a ₹30 crore budget for a film in Malayalam, that too without a leading star, was and is considered very risky by industry standards. For reference, ₹30 crore is termed bloated even for the biggest releases in Malayalam and for all practical purposes, Salmaan is right when he says he did not expect the first film in the Lokah series to make money. As he saw it, the first film was the world-builder, the introduction to Lokah’s cinematic universe. Instead of achieving breakeven, Salmaan and his team had been working overtime to figure “how much money [they] would lose”. This, especially when he learnt that there weren’t many buyers queuing up to take a punt.

The idea then was to just go all out and make this film with the belief that the future films of the series (four more in total) would surely make money. And today, as the film celebrates its blockbuster triple digit success, Salmaan feels it’s “vulgar” to reveal the real box-office collection of his film.

Not Playing Safe

Dominic Arun, the film’s director and writer, had been working on this idea for over six years. At first, it began as this indie film about bringing back the folklore of Neeli, a yakshi (female nature spirit), and planting her in today’s times. The film then grew and expanded into its own universe, widening itself up to multiple iconic characters from folklore including a Chathan (wizard), an Odiyan (shapeshifter), and Kathanar (sorcerer) among others. Yet, common logic suggests that it would have been easier to begin the series with a bang by casting a superstar to play one of these characters instead of the yet untested idea of a female mythical superhero.

In the first chapter, Tovino Thomas surfaces as Chathan and Salmaan makes a cameo as Odiyan. Either of them may have been trusted with this scale and the responsibility to introduce this universe, along the lines of how Robert Downey Jr. stepped in to play Iron Man in the first film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But for Salmaan, that idea seemed too passé, too safe to make an impact.

“I mean, me producing my own superhero movie?” he jokes, acknowledging how pompous that may have seemed. Even when he was asked to perform for the cameo, his thought wasn’t about how it would have helped the film. Instead, he said, “You guys should be able to make this without me [having to make an appearance].”

As he saw it, the idea was to always begin with Neeli, a cool new female superhero. He says, “By this point, we’ve had so many superhero movies that we didn’t need to introduce it as a new concept to our audience. The attraction was to begin with a ‘girl superhero’. That was already cool, and it could become a clutter-breaker. The only thing to do was to commit to this fully and go all out with the first film.”

In a strange twist, it was the producer of the film that convinced the director and the director of photography (Nimish Ravi) to think bigger. “At first, we wanted to make it within the constraints of the industry,” says Arun. “It needed to be made within a certain budget that was deemed affordable for a female-oriented film. Of course, we wanted our producer to make his money too.” But as Arun and Ravi discussed these ideas with Salmaan, the producer gave him the option to think beyond limitations. “Nimish and I had a vision for this to be approached like it was an indie. But we also had thoughts and visuals on how to make it much bigger.”

Although it may seem like an obvious decision now that the film has done so well, theirs was not a proposition that seemed viable. Director Arun had made just one movie (Tharangam) and it had fared poorly. Priyadarshan had one solo release as lead with Shesham Mike-il Fathima (2023), about a Muslim girl from a conservative background trying to become Kerala’s first female sports commentator. This too wasn’t a film that had done well. As for Salmaan, although his films in other languages continued to do well, his last Malayalam film, King of Kotha (which he also produced), was a massive disappointment. With Lokah, this trio was not just attempting to change the business with a very expensive experiment, but each had their own redemption arcs to play out.

Mammootty, Malayalam cinema’s megastar and Salmaan’s father, is said to have been very worried about Lokah’s burgeoning costs. As for veteran director Priyadarshan (Kalyani’s father), he didn’t seem to have understood the economics of it at all. Salmaan says, “Her dad [Priyadarshan] called and asked, ‘What were you thinking? How did you know? Why did you make this bet?'”

Building Chandra

Not that this long gestation period was without self-doubt and insecurities between the three of them. Priyadarshan recalls a frantic call she made to Salmaan on either the third or fourth day of shoot when she felt unsure if she’d be able to pull it off. It was a world that was totally alien to her and she was playing a character totally unlike who she was in real life. But when she called him with this doubt, he joked that feeling insecure on sets was something he was something of a master at. “He asked me if I felt the decisions being made on the sets were right,” Priyadarshan says. “When I said they were all bang on, Dulquer reassured me that Dominic would also be just as correct about his decision to cast me as well. That pep talk helped me surrender to Dominic and I must thank him for what he saw in me,” she says.

She feels the joy she’s experiencing today has just as much to do with the acceptance she’s been getting for a performance that gave her little to draw from her own personality. “You see how animated I am. I use my whole body and hands to talk. I’ve blinked 10 times with each sentence. And here Dominic was explaining my character Chandra to me and saying that you will do none of that. She’s a character that’s been numb through hundreds of years, having worn so many masks. I needed to figure a way to move that way… as though I’m floating through time and space,” she says.

What helped Arun was that he had been travelling with Chandra’s character for years. He had a very specific vision for how she’d eat, breathe and sleep. “I even had specific soundtracks for her to absorb the tempo of Chandra’s walk,” he says. It’s a combination of all these factors that finally made Chandra real and relatable even though she’s part vampire, part superhero and part immortal. Even though she has all these superpowers, she is also infinitely melancholic, the kind of character who dreads having to wake up. She’s also a regular girl living in Bengaluru, having to do her chores, mop the floor and find a part-time job to make ends meet. “With the other actors in the movie, I think we could allow them to be totally free and just about do anything,” says Arun. “But with Chandra, we had to be sure that people connect to her.” It’s these thoughts that eventually made Chandra vulnerable and real despite her powers.

The screenplay was also co-written by actor and writer Santhy Balachandran, who gave the film an added feminist angle, tailor-made for a female superhero character. Not only did the film work better because the film played out like a battle against misogyny (the film’s super villain is particularly sexist), but it also added emotional heft to Chandra. “Santhy’s contributions were invaluable. No matter how hard I try, I wouldn’t have been possible to do full justice to a film in which a woman is the protagonist.”

He cites an example from the film to explain the difference she made. In the scene that takes place the night after Chandra reveals her full powers to Sunny (Naslen), she asks Sunny why he had been following her. As a writer and as a man, the line Arun had written explains that it was Sunny trying to save Chandra. “But, as Santhy read these lines and worked on them, she wrote it again to underline the emotion that a woman doesn’t always need a man saving her.”

These touches make all the difference for a little girl growing up today watching herself being represented on screen. For the generations of boys having grown up watching male superheroes, with Lokah it’s finally time to see a girl just like them kicking ass and enjoying the process while she’s at it. As for the three-boy gang (actors Naslen, Chandu Salimkumar and Arun Kurian), it was their jobs to make sure the film remained funny. “Those three were our portal into this new world and they needed to be funny because when something is told to us through humour, we engage,” Arun says. “I’ve also always been a huge fan of her dad,” he says pointing to Priyadarshan. “That’s what I enjoy writing the most.” Even the Bengaluru setting for the film and the Rear Window-like shots in the film are what Arun calls his tributes to her father’s film Vandanam (1989).

As they bask in the glory of the first instalment, they’re not unaware of the pressure and the hype they’d have to deal with while making the next parts. Looking at the blockbuster, Salmaan even jokes that a lot of producers from around the country have been contacting Arun with enticing offers for his next. But Arun is sure that even his next films will be fully and entirely within the Lokah universe.

For now, though, social media has gone berserk as Salmaan confirmed that the film’s big boss villain, named Moothon, will “hopefully” be played by Mammootty himself in one of the franchise’s future films. “He’s not easy at all to convince. And just because we have access to him, I don’t want to misuse that option. Eventually, we have to prove to him that we have earned him to accept being a part of Lokah. Maybe with the way the first film has fared, he probably believes that we too know a little bit about what we’re doing here.”

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