‘Bougainvillea’ Review: A Gripping Mind Game With Stellar Acts

Director: Amal Neerad
Writer: Amal Neerad, Lajo Jose
Cast: Kunchacko Boban, Jyothirmayi, Srinda, Fahadh Faasil
Language: Malayalam

Amal Neerad and his co-writer Lajo Jose (whose story this film is based on) know how far to push the unreliable narrator trope. Not only is their protagonist Reethu (Jyothirmayi in her return) suffering from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, but we’re seeing the film through her perspective for the most part. What makes this film even more complex is how quickly we get the feeling that we cannot rely on the people Reethu relies on to make sense of her chilling universe.

This could be something as simple as the notebook she must read to find out everything about who she is and how she got here. Items on the kitchen shelves need names, just like how she needs to write tiny chits to keep note of all the events that make up her day. As a painter, this malfunctioning memory does not allow for her a lot of creativity. She wakes up every day, sends her children to school, and sits in front of an empty canvas to paint the same red bougainvillea again and again.

But why these same flowers? Do they represent a happy memory? Or is she just painting the red flowers that decorate the entrance to her dreamy house?

These images leave us with a strong, unsettling feeling. We never feel like we can trust anything we see on screen, and this has been created by design because that must be what someone like Reethu must be going through. In one moment, we see her in full cheer, smiling gleefully for achieving the smallest of things. In the very next, she is a nervous wreck, unable to function.

The film’s mind games have been strewn all through. In some shots, we see the names of the residents written on the bedroom doors of this house. In a later scene, these names are missing, forcing us to wonder if they were ever there. In some scenes, we get the feeling that Reethu’s husband Royce (Kunchacko Boban) has some sort of limp. But later on, we’re not sure if we imagined it.

All of this makes for an Amal Neerad film, where we hardly get a second to look around and observe the beauty of Anend C. Chandran’s frames. Dense and tightly packed, there are details like a subplot about a missing bracelet that requires a second viewing to fully make sense of.

This makes it vital for us to remain completely invested because that’s the only way we can slowly enter Reethu’s world. An example of this comes in the way that we never get a feeling we’re seeing the “real” Reethu. It is as though she’s an illusion because, for long stretches, we see her only through reflections in the mirror. Similarly, when we first see her, it is through the gaps in her front gate. She’s often framed this way, either through the metal gate or through the window, giving us the feeling that she is somehow trapped in this house.

And this is true when you see how she’s relying only on the people in her house. When you add Easter eggs involving the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, the film in itself operates like a hallucination.

However, Neerad uses these rich ideas to plant a very real story. In some of his movies, you don’t always get the balance of a serious social issue mixing with his hyper-stylised vision. I can’t think of another film that uses the unreliable narrator to fully immerse us into a film about “gaslighting” and domestic abuse.

Music composer Sushin Shyam outdoes himself in the way he becomes the captain steering this film into spaces, even before the screenplay gets there. The same goes with the sound design, as it creates a scary, hopeless feeling about spaces without having to show you a single scary image.

The only issue I felt was that the film had this need to over-explain in parts of the second half. It’s as though you have created a psychological thriller but you’re being forced to simplify it to make it into a film for the masses. It only didn’t manage to fit a police investigation angle into the film’s larger themes.

Finally, it’s the two leads who keep the film from slipping away, even when it enters into the zone of horror, like The Shining (1980). It’s wonderful to see an actor like Jyothirmaryi make a comeback with a film like this, in which she not only has to play a character with vulnerability, but has to also take the audience with her, even when it becomes hard to follow the film.

We also have Boban, proving beyond doubt that the decision to cast him was a killer move. He becomes the perfect Amal Neerad muse by the end and surprises you with shades you have never seen in him. What else can you say but “Chackochan pazhaya Chackochan alla (Chackochan is not the same old Chackochan)”.