Asuffocating, hyperreal vertical sprawl of tightly stacked skyscrapers defines “Neo Kochi” in the 2040s. Flying police cars slice through a permanent neon haze. Ultra-personalised AI ads resurrect the voices and faces of your dead relatives. Leaked memories circulate in shadowy tech markets—only to return later as grotesque immersive porn. Celebrities endlessly refashion their bodies, each transformation pushing them closer to the Ship of Theseus paradox: after so many alterations, does the original self remain original?
This is the chaotic, unnervingly plausible dystopia filmmaker Krishand conjures in his latest film, Masthishka Maranam: A Frankenbiting of Simon’s Memories—a cyberpunk carnival that is wildly inventive and, beneath all its technological madness, hilariously, disarmingly human.
For those who have followed Krishand’s work—a filmography that includes the genre-bending Aavasavyuham: The Arbit Documentation of An Amphibian Hunt and the visually unconventional Purusha Pretham—Masthishka Maranam feels like a natural continuation. Yet, as his first wide theatrical release, the film has also drawn sharper attention, bringing with it both immense admiration and biting backlash.
“The people who liked it really loved it,” he said. “But I received ample hate too. Those who didn’t like the film were angry at me.”
A conversation with a friend helped him contextualise that response. She mentioned a record-breaking blockbuster and asked if he connected with it. He didn’t—he said he hated it. “That’s when she told me to look at cinema as a spectrum,” he recalled. “You are on one side and they are on the other. That’s okay.”
The thought stayed with him. Every kind of film, he said, finds its own audience—and its own detractors. Cinema is wide enough to hold many sensibilities. “We can’t stand here claiming we are the only intelligent ones and everyone else is wrong,” he said.
Krishand’s journey into filmmaking, he said, began with a childhood habit: sketching: “I grew up on graphic novels. Near my school there was a shop that sold old comics—old DC Superman and things like that.”
Alongside a friend who wrote the text, he began creating graphic-style stories: “Sequential storytelling felt very innate to me. It was almost like a primal skill—drawing and telling a story, with the book moving forward frame by frame.”
The connection to cinema came later. “Films work in a similar way—you just don’t have to draw everything. I realised that around the time I was in tenth standard.”
Years later, at the IDC School of Design at IIT Bombay, he still saw himself at a crossroads: filmmaker or comic-book artist. At the time, he leaned more towards comics. His early experiments featured Tintin-like characters and, after watching Jurassic Park, even a dinosaur hunter. As he grew older, the worlds he imagined darkened, often drifting into the post-apocalyptic terrain. “But since I am Malayali, there was always a certain Malayali flavour in those stories,” he said.
That instinct sharpened after he showed one his works—a graphic novel about the end of the world that, he admitted, was partly a rip-off of I Am Legend—to a faculty member. “He told me, ‘You keep making these end-of-the-world stories, but you come from a rich cultural place—you have Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and so many other writers. Why are you still copying the movies you have seen?”
The remark nudged him toward Malayalam literature. He began reading Basheer and M.T. Vasudevan Nair more deeply. Around the same time, filmmaking started pulling him in, and the visual instincts he had developed from comics translated naturally into storyboarding.
The comic-book sensibility remains visible in his films. Even as he explores globally resonant themes—ecological fragility in Aavasavyuham, or voyeurism and objectification in Masthishka Maranam—his work stays rooted in a distinctly Malayali cultural landscape.
But these explorations often lead him to an important paradoxical question: can cinema critique objectification without participating in it?
“It’s a very important question,” he said. “In war films, if you show war, you are already dealing with that paradox.” He cited François Truffaut’s famous observation that every anti-war film eventually becomes a war film.
That paradox shaped his approach to Sangharsha Ghadana: The Art of Warfare. Instead of depicting war directly—with bullets and heroism—he approached it obliquely through a gangster narrative. “We tried to see if you can make a war film without glorifying war itself,” he said.
A similar dilemma arose with item songs. “Can you talk about objectification without showing it?” he asked. One approach, he said, was to present an objectifying image in a B-grade style to provoke a strong reaction from the audience. When an item song from Masthishka Maranam, featuring Rajisha Vijayan, was released before the film, it triggered exactly that reaction.
“Even if a small section of viewers watches the full film, they might understand why we created that discomfort,” he said. “Others may remain angry. Both reactions serve a purpose.”
The challenge, he added, lies in the age of fragments—where provocative clips circulate without context, a phenomenon his film itself grapples with.
Beyond directing, Krishand has also worked as cinematographer, editor and producer. In Purusha Pretham, his use of negative space—the empty or unoccupied space surrounding and between the subjects in a frame—creates striking effects, while Masthishka Maranam carries an editing rhythm reminiscent of comic panels. Taking on multiple roles, he said, is partly practical. Translating what exists in his mind to someone else can feel like doubling the mental effort.
In his early years, Krishand largely self-funded his films—a limitation that restricted resources but also enabled creative freedom. After Aavasavyuham, his work began attracting producers. For Masthishka Maranam, Ajith Vinayaka Films mounted an extensive promotional campaign. Still, many producers found his projects “tricky”, given his experimental storytelling. That same trickiness has so far delayed some rumoured mega-projects with Malayalam superstars.
Across his films, one detail remains constant: the long, quirky titles that even a Malayali might struggle to grasp at first glance. Fittingly, his own name, Krishand, is just as unusual.
“My grandmother gave me that name,” he said. “She had heard names like Krishnakant or Krishnanand somewhere and suggested, ‘Krishand would be a good name.’ My father finalised it. No one else seemed to have it. There’s something a bit crazy about that.”
Once, when he was in college, he asked his father about its meaning. He replied that it didn’t really have one. But during a visit to an ISKCON temple, someone offered him an interpretation. “They said Krish could mean ‘darkness’ and ‘anth’ could mean ‘end’—the end of darkness’. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got a new meaning for my name’,” he said.
It feels apt. Krishand’s career, in many ways, is an ongoing search for new meanings—pushing beyond rigid conventions and templates to shine a light on the possibilities on the other side.