‘Aaro’, the title, signals the presence of an unknown person in the unceremonious setting of an unclaimed house. The film begins as if a stranger has entered a space that no longer belongs to anyone in particular and, by extension, a life that has drifted away from purpose. Over the course of the film, we understand that this presence is an intrusion by a ghost from the past, yet the intrigue remains. Although it is a short film, I like to call it a movie. It leaves the viewer hanging, slightly confused, in a way that is rather deliberate.
Have we seen this before? Yes, multiple times. Does that automatically make this film any lesser? Perhaps not! In fact, Aaro helped me deconstruct the cliched “Clara” concept from Thoovanathumbikal, where a man longs for periodic encounters with an unrequited love whenever it rains. The film plays with a similar idea, yet here the rain is not only a romantic trigger. It is entangled with ageing, illness and a deep, private fear.
For a state where it rains for more than two thirds of the year, this matters. If films continue to frame rain only as a backdrop for male longing, Kerala’s weather is condemned to carry the same narrow emotional script. Aaro just might alter that fate a little; the rain here is not merely a romantic setting. It belongs to a loner, an intellectual, a habitual drinker who is already living with an apparent heart disease. Ranjith makes a convincing case for the kinds of hallucinations that such a body and life might produce.
The house and its women
The protagonist, played by director Shyamaprasad, does not seem to have a clear routine or purpose. He drifts through the house, through his day and his habits. Yet the context of his hallucination hints at an underlying desire to get his life in order, to sort out his heart, his drinking and smoking. He deeply wishes for the presence of a woman in his life; and in one key moment someone, ‘Aaro’, walks into his house and, metaphorically, into his life. He cleans up a bit, makes space, imagines that she might help him recover. For a brief stretch the house feels almost ready to be lived in again.
This sits uncomfortably close to a conservative literary script that many of us instantly recognise in which a woman’s presence is primarily utilitarian. Woman, in whichever role, mother, wife, girlfriend or sister, turns up so that a man can feel alive or complete. The movie can certainly be criticised on these grounds, since the woman is imagined largely in terms of what she can repair in him.
Yet this may also be an honest reflection of the protagonist’s own limitations. What else are we to expect from a man in his sixties, in what appears to be a quasi-feudal setting that resembles a Nair tharavad, whose emotional vocabulary has been formed under precisely such expectations. If we can set this aside or at least hold it in view without allowing it to exhaust our reading, Aaro opens up a number of other possibilities for appreciation.
One last call
My own contention is that the protagonist has a near death experience in the night. Perhaps another cardiac episode, perhaps an uncontrolled palpitation that suddenly makes the prospect of dying very real. In response, an adrenaline rush pushes his brain into a hallucination that tries to blunt the pain. Inside that altered state, he hears a call from a loved one, long forgotten and stages the possibility of her visit. Trauma literature has numerous such accounts, where people in severe pain or danger report that their mind reached instinctively for the most comforting memories available.
Somehow, he manages to sleep; when he wakes the next day, the fear has not left and the underlying condition almost certainly has not changed. He catches the thread of the previous night and rides on it. The pain and the regret are masked by the device of the unknown woman who calls from a private number. The direction is careful here; the pacing is slow, the shots linger, the performance remains understated. The film gives him time to fold his fear into this fantasy of rescue. It is almost disappointing when the illusion breaks, not through some dramatic inner awakening, but through the auto driver who uncomfortably points out that he himself hailed the vehicle. The door closes behind him and, in my opinion, that is the moment when he collapses in the courtyard.
What happens next is not hard to imagine; the auto driver takes him to hospital. This time he does not survive. His body already knows this, which is why the memories are so vivid, why smell, touch and desire all gather around this one woman from the past. Seen in this way, the film borrows heavily from familiar genres yet uses them to let us sit with something more fundamental. It becomes less a story about romance or even loneliness and more an attempt to feel what the fear of death might look like from the inside.
The beginning of an end
It is also tempting to see the plot as more than a coincidence. Ranjith himself has reportedly been dealing with health concerns over the past year, although I may be entirely mistaken in drawing such a parallel. Even if this line of thought is wrong, Aaro feels like the work of a filmmaker attending closely to the limits of the ageing body and the stories it tells itself in order to continue. Overall, this is a finely crafted movie that uses familiar tropes to stage something more unsettling; a dying mind rehearsing the one call it will never make. I would happily recommend watching it and, ideally, arguing over it afterwards.
Watch the film here:
Cringe movie🤭😊