A Closer Look at Sookshmadarshini and the Private Eye
What if Nancy Drew grew up to be a nosy ammayi in Kunnamkulam?
Sookshmadarshini was unironically one of my favorite films in 2024. Funny, smart and pulpy, blended with pookie performances by Nazriya and Basil. The movie subverts the typical "whodunit", for a "whydunit" — revealing the “who” of the villain right away while it keeps the audience on their tiptoes on the “why”, with just the right amount of red herrings, twists and clever misdirections. Let’s put Sookshmadarshini under a microscope and see what it reveals. Also, spoilers ahead.
The Naked and The Private Eyes
The detective genre is a beloved staple in fiction — from your Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirots to the likes of Scooby-Doo and Nancy Drew. Sookshmadarshini, a homage to these classics, seems to take most of it's inspiration from the 1954 Hitchcock classic "Rear Window," and not just in their uncanny choice of titles.
Both Priyadarshini and Jeffrey are portrayed as victims of boredom — dissatisfied with their daily routines. They escape from mundanity by harmlessly observing others' lives through a back window. This indulgence plunges them into a murder mystery and brings out their innate compulsiveness. They suspect that their eccentric neighbours have committed a crime and strive to prove it. They resort to less-than-legal measures to satiate their curiosity and solve the crime before it's too late.
Like Rear Window, Sookshmadarshini positions us alongside the protagonist, making us complicit in the peeping. We are unknowingly voyeurs into the lives of strangers and worlds of not our making.
We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy?
- Rear Window
Looking Through a Microscope Darkly
A popular (and rather vocal) opinion online is that Priya is merely a nosy “ammayi” intruding into her neighbours' affairs. Her clever detective skills are objected to be a product of selection bias tied up by Lady Luck. However, this perspective seems to be rather myopic and misses the mark.
The nosy, obsessive-compulsive amateur detective is a classic archetype in the genre— often bending the rules in pursuit of the truth. Funnily, critics also lamented about Rear Window because the hero spent all his time being a peeping tom! Many of these stories have Rube-Goldberg levels of plot contrivances designed to hook the reader, they aren’t intended to be masterstrokes either. The lackluster truth is that these stories do not try to seriously comment on the ethics of voyeurism or vigilantism; they are charming because they feature resourceful individuals who do not walk the tight rope of society’s norms. These are pulpy, deftly written fantasy stories for the readers to vicariously enjoy.
Priya isn't vastly different; she is unapologetically nosy, stubborn and persistent. Her setting is the natural habitat for an amateur lady super sleuth to thrive in Kerala. In a way, "Sookshmadarshini" challenges us not to underestimate individuals based on stereotypes. Manuel and his mother appear to be sweet and lovable on the surface but harbour a deep, parochial mindset. Priya and her meddling “ammayi” gang may seem like simple and annoying homemakers — yet they are remarkably resourceful and among them are independent single moms and working parents. We shouldn't let misogyny and our biases confine them to categories of our projection.
The Curious Case of the Ozymandias Rex
(Apologies for the slight detour into palaeontology, but I love making analogies.)
Once upon a Jurassic time, dinosaurs ruled the earth. And as we all learnt in high school, around 66 million years ago, a big bad asteroid fell from the sky and struck the Yucatán Peninsula, wiping out all dinosaurs from existence. It's a neat story, but it isn’t the full picture.
It is a common misconception that birds are merely descendants of dinosaurs. In reality, birds are the last surviving members of the dinosaur clade Avialae and are phylogenetically, reptiles. This means birds are not just related to dinosaurs—they ARE dinosaurs themselves! Bird sanctuaries are really Jurassic Parks.
From the ashes of the massive Brachiosauruses and the vicious T. Rexes, birds and mammals emerged and thrived. So why did they survive, while the other mini-dinos did not? Birds, like humans and cats, have larger brains relative to their body size. This unseeming advantage gave them enough resourcefulness to adapt to their rapidly changing environment and survive. Curiosity, it seems, was a significant asset to our genes in the grand scheme of evolution.
Curiosity Killed the Cat, But Purrsistance Brought Her Back
In an era when movie plots struggle due to the omnipresence of phones, Sookshmadarshini embraces technology, seamlessly integrating it into its narrative. Priya uncovers Ammachi's feigned Alzheimer's using ChatGPT, coordinates her gang via WhatsApp groups, hunts clues using Google Maps and the big reveal unfolds through (rather convenient) Instagram searches. The rising tide of technological progress is daunting, yet it serves as a great equalizer for the sexes, the urban and rural.
Manuel’s criminal master plan on the surface seems perfect (although I would bet that his cousin winged it after binging on Breaking Bad). His scheme relied on the villagers being country bumpkins stuck in a “Jurassic Park” of his imagination.
Curiously, the first thing we see Manuel do when he moves in, is him pelting stones at a stray cat. The cat, persistent and stubborn, never backs out. In the film’s closing montage, the same cat confronts Manuel, now caught red-handed, while the frames merge back to Priya and her friends.
The cat, symbolizing the feminine, brings the film together — it is an ode to women under the guise of a crime thriller. Priya’s undying concern for the vulnerable, the camaraderie of the girl gang and their unsaid womance is what drives them to the end.
Manuel (and his mother) are overconfident, Facebook-using, thantha-vibing, bible-thumping, tharaavadi T. Rexes. They underestimate Priya's ingenuity, the strength of feminine love and the transformative impact of technology, and that proves to be their undoing.
One only needs to peer with a sookshmadarshini to unravel that the real crime was a “konacha” plan all along, and that, uh, girls find a way.
