This piece, however, will focus on the question of family, which the script untiringly pursues from the very beginning. The acting is stellar and the cinematography fully attuned to the island topography of Kumbalangi, where the story takes place. The deftness with which the film weaves its themes-abandonment, masculinity, mental illness and marginality-into the plot is truly praiseworthy. This tale of four brothers-Saji, Bonny, Bobby and Franky, who turn out in the end to be each other’s true ‘keepers’ despite their individual travails and mutual conflicts-is remarkable for many reasons.
#Kumbalangi nights ending movie#
Kumbalangi Nights, arguably the best Malayalam movie of 2019 so far, and one of the best to have come out of the ‘renaissance’ underway in the Malayalam film industry in recent years, has the question of family at its heart. 1 In recent times, though, this idea of kinship has come up against its limits both in the West and in places in the ‘Global South’ like India, with same-sex marriage, adoption and surrogate parenthood challenging the existing normative and structural understandings around the institution of family. First, a shared acknowledgement of genealogy, and second, shared ‘primary’ substances, i.e., blood, bone and semen. What makes a family? For a long time, the social sciences, and anthropology in particular, have answered this question on the basis of two things. The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the item promoted, Century Films, the publisher of the item promoted or the graphic artist.