‘Kalamkaval’, the recently released Malayalam cinema, enters as a thriller rooted in an uneasy proximity between fact and fiction, unmistakably recalling the real case of Mohan Kumar, “Cyanide Mohan,” a primary school teacher, whose crimes between 2003 and 2009 targeted vulnerable unmarried women under the pretext of marriage. But ‘Kalamkaval’ goes further by recasting its killer as a police officer, Stanley Das, a shift that demands deeper scrutiny. This narrative decision invites us to consider whether the film is hinting at a deeper malaise within the structures of authority themselves. It opens the unsettling possibility that the State, through its agents, can harbour a psychopathology of its own, one in which the power to protect and the power to kill emerge from the same institutional core.
Stanley Das is terrifying not simply because he kills, but because his violence echoes the deeper truth that the State kills—through lock-up torture, custodial deaths, firing orders, staged encounters, and everyday deceit and arbitrariness. His character makes visible a proximity between authority and violence that no conventional good-cop/bad-cop binary can adequately mask, revealing a continuum of coercion that extends far beyond the individual villain.
Rooted in a southern Kerala temple ritual where the goddess seeks out and slays the demon Darika, the term ‘Kalamkaval’ carries rich symbolic potential. However, the film employs this reference only at a surface level, without allowing it to meaningfully inform or deepen the narrative. The two male protagonists deliver remarkably riveting, finely layered performances that anchor the film, albeit at the expense of a quieter, less fully realised portrayal of the women.
Vinayakan’s restrained, anti-melodramatic performance as the investigating officer is marked by determination and empathy, while Mammootty’s portrayal of Stanley Das is subtle, interpretative, and deeply nuanced, an exemplary study in controlled menace. Stanley Das embodies the paradox of modern authority: the state’s figure of legitimate violence becomes the agent of predatory violence. His uniform grants trust, access, and invisibility, allowing the film to gesture toward a disturbing theoretical insight, the state can harbour within itself the very violence it claims to contain. The psychopath is not outside the system; he is its concealed double. The lead actors elevate this narrative.
What intensifies the film’s critical force is its treatment of women as figures who are socially invisible long before they become victims. ‘Kalamkaval’ offers almost no narrative space for these women to unfold as subjects or to articulate their own desires and fears; instead, they appear largely through the State’s retrospective gaze once they are already dead. The boundary between being alive and being erased is portrayed as thin and disturbingly blurred. These women, quickly labelled as having “eloped,” occupy the edges of social legitimacy, and their disappearance is registered only through institutional suspicion or moral judgment. Though Stanley Das is likely a Nadar Christian by naming conventions in the region, he fluidly alters his caste and religious identity to align with each victim’s social location, an unsettling tactic that exposes how easily social markers can be manipulated to exploit trust.
When Fiction Walks in the Footsteps of a Killer: The Film’s Eerie alignment with the Cyanide Mohan Case
The change in the figure of the central character is not casual or arbitrary, but carries unmistakable political connotations. The film transforms the real-life perpetrator, a schoolteacher, entrusted with shaping young minds, into a police officer, the most visible arm of state authority and repression. This shift from pedagogy to policing is symbolic: it reframes the criminal not as a malfunctioning individual within society but as a darker extension of the state itself, suggesting that violence can emerge from the very institutions meant to protect and civilise.
The parallels between ‘Kalamkaval’ and the real case of Mohan Kumar, popularly known as “Cyanide Mohan,” are unmistakable despite the film’s claims of fictionalisation. Mohan, a former schoolteacher active between 2003/2004 and 2009, targeted unmarried women from economically and socially vulnerable backgrounds by promising marriage, persuading them to elope, and then killing them using cyanide tablets disguised as contraceptives. The film reproduces this pattern almost point-for-point through the character of Stanley Das, who similarly befriends women, offers them marriage or a future together, and leads them to border-town lodges where they later turn up dead in washrooms after consuming cyanide. This specific choreography, sex, a pill presented as contraception, cyanide ingestion, and the body discovered in a bus-stand or lodge washroom, is too close to the real modus operandi of Cyanide Mohan to be accidental. Both Mohan and Stanley Das also share the pattern of stealing the victims’ gold and money after killing them, treating these women not only as targets of predation but as sources of material gain, a further point of convergence that underscores how the film closely mirrors the economic motives embedded in the real crimes. The film reproduces this pattern with striking fidelity: Stanley Das, the psychopath, befriends women seeking stability, leads them across state borders, takes them to anonymous lodges, and administers cyanide disguised as contraceptive pills, echoing almost exactly the choreography of Mohan’s murders, where bodies were discovered in bus-stand washrooms or lodge rooms. Although the film introduces some dramatic layering, even the element of communal tension, the triggers the investigation into a serial killing episode, is not strictly fictional. In the real case, the disappearance and death of one of the victims of Mohan, initially generated communal misunderstanding and public unrest, and it was the investigation linked to this episode that eventually led to Mohan’s arrest. Thus, the temporal setting, victim profile, and method of killing firmly anchor the film in the disturbing landscape of those documented crimes.
Both narratives unfold in the same historical window, the early-to-late 2000s, a period before widespread smartphone usage, which is exactly when Mohan committed his crimes before being arrested in 2009. The geography also aligns: Mohan operated across coastal Karnataka and parts of northern Kerala, while the film relocates the killings to the border regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, preserving the idea of a serial killer who exploits cross-border mobility and anonymity. In both cases, the victims belong to precarious social locations, women constrained by gender norms, often seeking escape or companionship, whose disappearance the police initially treat as voluntary elopements.
The film further mirrors Mohan’s double life: he maintained a respectable persona as a teacher and family man while carrying out serial murders; Stanley Das similarly leads a parallel domestic life that provides him with cover and credibility. Media discourse around the film strengthened these associations even before the release, with trailers, reviews, and social commentary repeatedly identifying connections to the Cyanide Mohan case, even as the actor and directors denied a direct biographical intent. Though ‘Kalamkaval’ adds new layers, ritualistic imagery, and a more stylised villain, the structural pattern of predation, the timeline, the social profile of victims, and the central role of cyanide firmly anchor the film in the real and disturbing landscape of Mohan’s documented crimes.
The Cop as Psychopath: Reading Stanley Das Politically
In ‘Kalamkaval’, the decision to cast the serial killer Stanley Das as a police officer is more than a narrative twist; it becomes a disturbing meditation on the intimacy between authority and violence in modern society. A police officer is, after all, the most immediate embodiment of what Max Weber called the state’s “monopoly over legitimate violence.” When such a figure becomes the perpetrator of secret, predatory violence, the film asks us to confront the uncomfortable truth that the line separating protection from violation is far thinner than we assume. Stanley Das does not operate outside the law; he operates from within it, using the same institutional trust, procedural discipline, and bureaucratic invisibility that ordinarily assure citizens of their safety. The horror comes not only from his crimes but from the recognition that the very structures designed to restrain violence can also conceal and reproduce it.
Modern power is not merely repressive; it operates through surveillance, regulation, and the management of bodies. The police force is one of the clearest expressions of this power, meant to maintain order, track movements, and categorise the population. Stanley Das appears, at first glance, as the ideal agent of such a disciplinary apparatus, precise, calm, procedurally competent. Yet this same disposition enables his crimes. The rationality and order that should protect life are inverted, exposing the darker possibility within biopower: that the authority to “make live” is inseparable from the power to “let die.” When the police officer becomes the killer, the film collapses this paradox into a single figure. His uniform grants him access, trust, and mobility; it shields him from suspicion and elevates his violence to a zone where oversight fails. Through Stanley Das, the film stages the unsettling idea that modern institutions can produce the very forms of violence they claim to contain.
The sovereign power, as Agamben says, creates spaces where certain lives become “bare life”, lives that can be killed without consequence because they fall outside the protections of the political order. The victims in ‘Kalamkaval’, like those in the real Cyanide Mohan case, are women whose social position renders them particularly vulnerable: unmarried, financially insecure, and often travelling alone across state borders. Their disappearances are easily dismissed as elopements, a category that already lies at the edge of social legitimacy. When the killer in the film is a police officer, the message becomes clear: the state, through its agents, can decide which lives matter and which can be quietly erased. Stanley Das uses his institutional knowledge to turn women into “bare life,” exploiting the blind spots of the system with bureaucratic efficiency. The killings occur in liminal spaces, lodges, bus stands, toilets, sites that already exist at the margins of visibility, further emphasising how the state’s power to exclude can operate silently within everyday life.
Further, the police force, like most modern institutions of authority, is deeply embedded in patriarchal culture. It exercises control over women’s bodies in the name of protection, morality, and order. By making Stanley Das both protector and predator, the film exposes the patriarchal logic that underwrites this institutional power. His double life, as a respectable family man and a murderer, mirrors a familiar pattern in gendered violence, where the figure of patriarchal discipline masks the potential for brutality. The women he targets are not only socially vulnerable but symbolically positioned as bodies to be disciplined, regulated, or erased. In this sense, the film suggests that the violence he enacts is not merely a personal pathology but a structural one. The killer emerges not as an aberration but as the logical extreme of an order that already polices sexuality, mobility, vulnerability and loyalty to the State.
The psychological resonance of this doubling can also be read through paradigm of the Law and transgression. A police officer is the one who upholds norms, stabilises meaning, and ensures predictability. When that figure becomes the violator, the order itself collapses into its own shadow. Stanley Das embodies a kind of perverse enjoyment that derives precisely from overturning his designated role. His killings gain their power not simply from cruelty but from their betrayal of the very law he is meant to uphold. The spectator experiences a primal disturbance: the guardian figure, the one associated with moral clarity, becomes indistinguishable from the threat. This collapse is what lends the character his uncanny force.
The film’s intervention must also be understood within the cultural history of Malayalam cinema, where the police officer traditionally appears through a familiar binary: the good cop as the moral centre and the bad cop as his foil, who is often either the villain himself or his close accomplice, a pattern that routinely resolves itself in the triumph of the righteous officer. ‘Kalamkaval’ participates in this convention by positioning the investigating officer against the murderous Stanley Das, thus echoing the familiar narrative of a principled cop confronting deviation within the force. Yet the film simultaneously unsettles this comfort. The sheer power and nuance with which Stanley Das is portrayed as the “bad cop” destabilises the old dichotomy; his presence generates a lingering distrust that the eventual assertion of the “good cop” cannot fully contain. The tradition may demand that justice prevail, but the film leaves viewers with a far more unsettling residue, the recognition that the structures of authority themselves may conceal forms of violence far more insidious than the heroic tropes of Malayalam cinema have allowed us to imagine.
Stanley Das unsettles not merely because he is a killer, but because his actions gesture toward a broader, more disquieting reality: the violence of the State itself. In a landscape marked by custodial torture, encounter killings, firing orders, and the casual arbitrariness of everyday policing, his crimes become an exaggerated mirror of practices that are institutionally sanctioned or quietly ignored. The character exposes how deeply intertwined authority and violence can be, eroding the comfort of familiar binaries in which the “good cop” ultimately neutralises the “bad cop.” Instead, he reveals a continuum of coercive power that exceeds the individual perpetrator and implicates the very structures meant to uphold justice, leaving the viewer with an unease that the narrative resolution cannot fully dispel.
