The trailer was bad, but it was occasionally hilarious. So let me start with the positives of the movie. Well, our trolls and memes are finally showing a small impact on the way Mr. Vipul Amritlal Shah thinks, because in The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond, one won’t see any jasmine flowers. And yes, since the story “goes beyond” Kerala this time, we have less cultural ignorance to deal with. But the problem is with the hate. If they were propagating certain agendas in a slightly subtle way in the first part, this new one has a very direct and shameless attack on minorities. The movie wants to show how young Muslim men brainwash Hindu women to increase their population in this country. But it would have been nice if they had given a little bit of brain to these women characters so that we would feel they are being washed.
The movie revolves around the stories of three women: Surekha, Divya, and Neha, who belong to Kerala, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, respectively. Divya is a minor who is addicted to making reels and getting likes and comments, and she is in love with Rasheed, who promises her he will allow her to make reels after getting married, unlike her parents, who object to it. Surekha is a liberal, progressive woman who is preparing for UPSC, and she is in love with Salim, a man who claims to be liberal and says he doesn’t want her to convert to Muslim. Then we have Neha, who is an athlete, and her lover manages to convince her to get married by telling her that he can make arrangements for her to get coaching from the best in the business. What happens in the lives of these three individuals is what we see in The Kerala Story 2.
For a movie like this, craft is never the focus of the filmmaking process. What they have is an agenda, and they want to push it down your throat. The acceptance the first movie received in the rest of India has given the makers the confidence to spread the venom beyond Kerala, and this time they are not hiding their intentions at all. What you see in the trailer of the movie is pretty much what you get in the movie. The add-ons are basically elements that would make you hate a Muslim. The writing process of the movie is pretty simple. Collect all the terms and accusations against the first movie and assign those opinions as the opinion of either the victim or the people who ignore the warnings.
Among the three women, the one from Kerala is projected as the most educated one with a family that respects her choices. And there are sequences in the movie where Surekha, the Kerala girl, says, “Don’t say Islamophobic things, Acha,” “Don’t believe all the things from Whatsapp University Amme.” And the counterargument of the concerned family is “Information on WhatsApp is not entirely wrong.” The desperation to give authenticity to WhatsApp forwards is alarming and hilarious at the same time. I don’t think the target audience of the film is the youth. Because the way this movie has written those characters as dumb people with no capacity to think would only make them hate this movie. The target audience of the movie is the parents of teenagers and perhaps younger ones.
There is a scene in the movie where the Kerala girl says Hindus and Muslims are the same for her since her parents never taught her about Hinduism or Mantras and Tantras. When the Rajasthan girl’s parents plead to fellow Hindus to support them by uniting against Muslims, you are shown other parents telling them, “Don’t talk like those right-wingers.” The worst form of whitewashing happens towards the end of the movie, where the infamous Bulldozer Raj gets presented as a move against Muslims who ran brothels. Just like how they created a false narrative about Kerala in front of people who were ignorant about Kerala, they are trying to paint a different picture about Muslims from states like Rajasthan, UP, and Madhya Pradesh in front of people from other states.
Every Muslim in every frame in this movie is a representation of evil. The Rajasthan girl’s lover’s whole family is asking him to get her impregnated and have five or six kids at the earliest. The Madhya Pradesh guy’s mother is running a brothel. When one of these characters is murdered, you are shown that the whole family, comprising father, mother, and kids, is carrying the chopped parts to bury them. When it comes to Kerala, the girl is getting imprisoned in this closed Muslim community somewhere in Kochi, and we are shown that a big group of women wearing burqa, acting like guards who won’t let her go and would force her to eat beef. Again, trying to create a false narrative that Kerala’s Hindu girls hate beef, and it is the Muslims who are forcing them to eat it. All the good Muslims, according to the makers, have passed away, and the most prominent one in that small list was APJ Abdul Kalam.
Ulka Gupta, born in Bihar and brought up in Mumbai, is playing the Malayali girl in this movie. Like I said in the beginning, Vipul Amritlal Shah has observed the trolls and memes that got generated after he created Shalini Unni”Gri”shnan. So this time the characters look more Malayali, they speak fewer Malayalam words, with the most spoken words being “Mole” and “Acha”. And as always, their Hindi is fluent, and Malayalam is terrible. Aditi Bhatia plays the role of the overreacting teenager obsessed with the validation she gets through reels. Multiple song sequences featuring her are in the movie to create sympathy towards that character, and neither the dancing nor the placement of those moments created any impact. Aishwarya Ojha plays the role of the Madhya Pradesh girl Neha, and she was able to cover up the forced naivety of her character to a good extent with her performance.
The movie is said to be based on a handful of real events. But the treatment is such that anyone with common sense would realize that the agenda was written first and the research was done later. Since The Kerala Story 2 has gone beyond in spilling venom and whitewashing a certain kind of venom, I won’t be surprised if it again gets 2 National Awards along with a Rajya Sabha seat. The only request is not to feature it in the international competition of the International Film Festival of India, because that would lead to international humiliation. If you hate an uncle in your neighborhood or in your family who spreads all these malicious theories, trying to generalize an entire community, please ask them to watch this movie. The adrenaline and dopamine rush might actually kill them.
