'Diés Iraé' Movie Review: A Relentless, Unnerving Psychological Drama From Rahul Sadasivan

“Ghosting” is not a term one should ever have used casually when you’re in the same room as director Rahul Sadasivan. Not only does this modern master of horror look at the word differently but he's also capable of writing an entire screenplay based on how he understands this piece of Gen-Z lingo. This understanding is especially relevant given how he’s made another film about three people just like he did with Bhoothakalam and Bramayugam. And If Bhoothakalam used depression as its central theme to discuss generational trauma passing on from grandmother to grandson, Bramayugam used its three central characters to talk about class and caste divide systemic to Kerala.

The three "living" characters of Diés Iraé belong to three different social classes too, but instead of underlining their differences, Diés Iraé aims to explain how no amount of money (or the lack of it) can wish away human conditions bigger than societal structure. You notice this first when we observe the banal existence of Rohan (Pranav Mohanlal), a privileged f**kboy, who has everything, yet nothing, all at once. He lives in a sprawling mansion, the sort any one of us of would kill to own and yet you realise that it’s not even close to becoming a real home. Rohan goes about his nights partying, drinking, making out and smoking “spliffs”, always trying to escape from a reality any one of us may have assumed is fairytale-like.

You notice similar patterns with Madhu (Gibin Gopinath) too. His means appear meagre in comparison, but he too appears to be living a life just as solitary as Rohan’s. He looks after an ailing mother and you sense an inherent worry in him as he overthinks her final departure. Instead of following the “gift” Madhu seems to have inherited from his father (another Potti, perhaps in the same lineage as Kodumon?), he works as a building contractor, trying to make ends meet.

Yet you begin to truly experience the underlying theme of Diés Iraé only when you meet Eliamma (Jaya Kurup), a mother trying to hold on to what she has left of family. If Rohan’s occupation is that of an architect, Madhu becomes his symbolic executor as a contractor. As for Eliamma, who works as a house maid, you realise she is the one completing the trinity, combining the three forces that truly “make” a building into a home.

It’s an ingenious idea to bring these characters together, especially in a movie that is primarily about loneliness. In a twisted manner, Diés Iraé is as much about life’s most horrific incident bringing people together as it is about the same people trying to deal with grief. In Rahul Sadavisan’s singularly twisted manner, he conjures up a movie about trauma bonding, in a way only he can.

It’s these underlying themes that always makes Rahul’s cinema more than just any other horror movie. So, if Bhoothakalam is scary, it’s not in the least because one believes in ghosts or because a haunted house may exist in 2025. It’s because Rahul possesses a complex understanding of how we think and of how we exist with an inherent fear of mental health and how it can turn against us. Diés Iraé takes this fear several notches higher, giving us the feeling that none of us are ever truly above a pandemic of loneliness.

It’s an unsettling feeling because what makes a Rahul Sadasivan movie scary is what makes life itself scary. The horrors of his cinema work beyond jump scares and camera tricks, taking you to place in your head you never wanted to go to. And strangely, he’s also capable of helping us find hope in the absolute last place where we’d expect to find it. This could be Rohan, finding real purpose when he’s already born with everything. Despite all that he has in plentiful, you sense a disturbing melancholy in him and the irony of not having a single person he can call his own. As twisted as it may sound, it takes an actual ghost for Rohan to exorcise the ghosts from his past he’s been sheltering in his mind since childhood. 

Diés Iraé is relentless in the way it leaves you feeling deeply uncomfortable, forcing you to squirm in ways that only Norman Bates has made you feel before this. This then gets embedded deeper into oneself by Christo Xavier’s nerve-wracking score reminiscent of 70s gothic horror. Jayadevan Chakkadath's sound design does a lot of the heavy lifting, too, with several scenes written around seemingly innocuous sounds, such as that of a hair clip clicking and the chilling sounds of an anklet at nighttime. These separate elements are then held together by three ridiculously affecting performances by Pranav, Gibin and Jaya Kurup (she is sensational!), who combine to transfer all their fears onto us, making you feel just as trapped and helpless. Through Pranav's character (an architect who is the son of a great architect), we sense the pressures he must have felt living under the shadows of a father who is perhaps impossible to eclipse.

With Diés Iraé, Rahul Sadasivan stamps his signature as the foremost name in Indian cinema when it comes to matters of the mind and the tales of horror it begins to narrate when you let it slip. It’s a film so deeply disturbing that you leave the theatre bathed in cold sweat, battling the many demons within you that make "real" ghosts look like five-year-olds in a Halloween costume.