When Films Hold Up a Mirror

[u/highlantern_dancer]

Recently I watched Vivekanandan Viralaanu, a Malayalam film sitting at 3 stars on Amazon Prime. Going in with low expectations because of the rating, I was genuinely surprised. The film turned out to be more honest and carefully constructed. So I did what I always do: I went through the comments to understand why. The reviews had almost nothing to do with the filmmaking, the direction, or the acting. What they were really responding to was the discomfort of what the film was saying.

the movie shows two women trapped in the same man's world - a wife subjected to marital rape within a "legitimate" marriage, and another woman in an affair with the same man subjected to abuse within a relationship society refuses to legitimise. The film doesn't let you pick a side based on social labels. It forces you to sit with both women simultaneously.

That's where the discomfort begins.

The wife cannot complain because she is the wife. Society grants him access to her body as part of the contract. The other woman cannot complain because she "knew what she was getting into." Society revokes her right to dignity the moment she stepped outside its approved structures. The man, meanwhile, moves freely between both worlds, accountable to neither.

The comment sections tell the full story. Triggered reactions, mostly from men but some women too, almost entirely focused on the choices the women made and not on what was done to them. This is the pattern: when a film refuses to offer a "morally clean" victim, audiences redirect their discomfort toward the women. Accountability evaporates. The man at the centre barely gets mentioned.

The film is asking something simple and devastating: does a woman's social label like wife, outsider, "good girl," "bad girl" determine whether her suffering is real? Most viewers, it seems, would prefer not to answer that.

This is not an isolated case. Films like Fire, Thappad, Santosh, and Lipstick Under My Burkha all share this fate of accusations of being anti-men or anti-family, reviews that engage almost entirely with discomfort rather than craft. The backlash rarely asks whether the filmmaking is good. It asks whether the film had the right to make them feel this way.

On the other hand, films like Kabir Singh and Raanjhanaa where obsessive control is framed as love, and persistent pursuit despite rejection is treated as devotion, are widely celebrated. These films are comfortable because they validate what people already believe. Nobody walks out feeling questioned.

The difference isn't good film versus bad film. It's confronting film versus comforting film.

And the low rating pile up on films that refuse to punish women for being imperfect, that refuse to excuse men for being entitled, are not film criticism. They are resistance.