Spoilers ahead:
How do you live with yourself when you have the same face as someone who’s committed an unspeakable cruelty towards your family? That’s the question at the end of Iratta, writer-director Rohit MG Krishnan’s debut Malayalam feature, in which a policeman (Joju George) investigating the death of his twin (also Joju George) discovers that the deceased was also his daughter’s rapist. While twins in a murder mystery are usually a shorthand signifier for swapped places or mistaken identities, the visual in Iratta culminates in a more pervasive dread, not unlike the feeling evoked by the end of Oldboy (2003) or Incendies (2010). What began as a murder mystery is now an existential drama. Having never met his daughter, he now never can, knowing what the sight of his face will do to her.
Krishnan attributes childhood trauma to many of the ideas in Iratta, which deals with cycles of inherited violence and pain that are impossible to escape from. Happier times in his childhood involved watching as many films as he could. “Watching movies was my film school,” he said. The self-taught director made several short films while in college, between 2008 and 2012. After he graduated, Krishnan got a job as a system admin at the postal department and used his income to keep making shorts while he worked on a feature-length script. Now, following the release of Iratta on Netflix, he’s in talks with Red Chillies Entertainment to write their next script.
When you see twins in a murder mystery, the obvious conclusion is that it’s a case of swapped or mistaken identity, but how Iratta uses this idea for tragedy instead of tension is novel. How did you arrive at that idea?
I initially planned this as a small-budget, indie film with just one location — a police station. I watched a lot of one-location movies like 12 Angry Men (1957) and Exam (2009) and tried to see how they hooked people in, how they built curiosity. I also knew the ending had to be strong. I’d read this incident of a policeman who was shot inside a police station in Kerala and wrote a narrative around it. I started the first draft in 2017 and completed it within a year. It travelled through several producers and actors, during which I kept rewriting, adding new characters and layers.
Initially, the script didn’t have the twins. It was supposed to be about two unrelated people — Vinod and Pramod. When I narrated the story to Joju George, he said it might be more interesting to turn them into twins. And then the pandemic gave us two years to rework the script.