'Avihitham' Movie Review: Adultery Has Never Been This Funny 

If anyone else had written Avihitham apart from Senna Hegde and Ambareesh Kalathera, the second scene of the film would perhaps have become the first scene. It’s the scene in which the plot revolves around a village drunkard who catches a couple making out in the darkness in one corner of a coconut grove. Like the setup of a film like Knives Out (2019), the film plays out like a twisted investigation as the entire village comes together to find out the whereabouts of this couple, all for the vicarious pleasures of seeing someone else’s family fall apart.

But this is not where the film begins. Just a scene before that, we see an extreme wide shot of a paddy field with just the voices of four people talking. We do not see them, but it’s obvious that they are drinking. After minutes of small talk, the conversation veers to a hot topic, but it’s not politics or religion. They begin to discuss the plight of a fellow villager, who has just caught his wife cheating on him. 

We do not need any extra information about these people because this conversation could have happened anywhere. But as we listen in on this chat, vicariously enjoying the gossip, the wide shot reminds us that this film is as much a conversation about the voyeuristic nature of people as it is about any specific group. 

The pattern that follows plays out like a game of Chinese whispers. The drunkard goes on to reveal what he saw to his friend and then on to even more people. No one picks a side except to add fuel to the fire, with curiosity becoming the force that drives the gossip forward. Yet what makes the film so intriguing is how it reveals the identity of the man committing adultery, but it chooses to keep the woman in the shadows.

Even when the identity of the man becomes clear, it’s the woman’s identity that becomes hotly contested. Instead of blaming the man, they blame the woman for this “crime”, only for the entire weight of morality to be placed onto her. Which means that the witch hunt that follows is merely a ploy to catch the woman in the act. As word spreads and a group forms to investigate, the men take it upon themselves to become guardians of social order. 

Yet the treatment is anything but serious. When the village drunkard finds people to support him, he ropes in the village tailor, too. In a hilarious scene, this “ladies’ only” tailor explains how he doesn’t need to see a face to seek out any woman's identity because he has become an expert in female anatomy by stitching blouses for them. 

And as the group widens to add more men into the midst, the film remains comical as everyone finds joy in the suffering of others. They begin to work overtime, and they plan their mission with an army operation-like precision. The film also opens itself up to the most awkward double entendres. A joke about a little girl's curly hair begins to develop new meaning, just as an offhand comment about a husband moving to Dubai suddenly sounds dark. By this point, we’re so invested in their mission that the jokes simply write themselves. 

What adds more flavour is Senna Hegde’s signature addition of pop culture references. An important mill is called Pavanayi Flour Mill, a reference to Nadodikattu that comes to life just as one of the characters instinctively looks below the table as though he’s planning a move like Vijay in Kaththi. The CBI bgm too pops up to underline the ridiculousness of these men and the result they want to achieve. 

But despite all of this, the film still manages to squeeze in a relevant viewpoint about moral policing and how it spreads like cancer. In an incisive scene, the film examines the relationship between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law and how they, too, can form a sisterhood. In another, the film sets all of its important events as prime-time television soaps play on the TV. But as we compare what the men are up to when women watch their soap operas, we’re forced to ask ourselves about how much more dangerous the men are with their habits of peeping in. Everything fits into place in Avihitham as it speaks about feminism and the dangers of moral policing without even trying to take a moral high ground. It is what it is, and it’s not too surprising to notice how we, too, become part of these men, curious to find out who this woman could be.