Many shades of power

Disclaimer: This is more an interpretation than a review and hence may have spoilers. I watched the movie almost a month back and it refuses to leave my consciousness and hence this post. 

The best movie I watched in 2025 is the Malayalam Eko. Even James Cameron’s Avatar 3 comes only after Eko, for me.

Eko is about power, control, surveillance, and evil. The entire story unfolds in a forest in the Kerala-Karnataka border. Kuriachan owns a large area of land in the hilly and intimidating forest. He has a house on top of a hill where lives his Malaysian wife, Soyi, who is now an aged woman. Kuriachan cannot live with her because he is a notorious criminal wanted by many including the police. He lives somewhere in the forest in hiding and many men are on his trail.

Kuriachan met Soyi when she was a young and beautiful wife of a Malaysian dog trainer. She was kept like a prisoner by her husband with many dogs all around on an island with no other humans on it. The dogs are trained not to let Soyi go anywhere far from the house and also not to let anyone enter the island. Kuriachan and his friend Mohan Pothan arrive there with Soyi’s husband, as Kuriachan wants to adopt a trained dog of a particular breed.

Kuriachan is a wicked man who has many wives and children back in Kerala. Now he is enchanted by the exotic beauty of Soyi and devices a plan to get her husband imprisoned on a fabricated charge so that he can take Soyi with him, in spite of the fierce dogs that protect her. It is Mohan Pothan who contrives the strategies. This same man will later be betrayed in the same manner by Kuriachan and be arrested. After his jail term, he will be one of the many men who are in search of Kuriachan and who will also reveal the secret to Soyi who had been told that her husband was killed.

In the forest Kuriachan is protected by his dogs who are all menacingly fierce and well-trained too. The irony is that the dogs eventually switch loyalty. Kuriachan is not the one who feeds them; it is Soyi who does that. The one who feeds dogs controls them too. Soyi, the controlled, becomes the controller now. The prey becomes the predator.

There are many breathtaking threads in the plot with a Navy officer also in search of Kuriachan. Mohan Pothan gets his punishment as Soyi lets loose her fierce dogs on him.

Sandeep Pradeep as Peeyoos

Peeyoos is a young man, barely out of his teens, who is appointed by Kuriachan apparently to take care of the ageing Soyi; but in reality he is Kuriachan’s spy. He was saved by Kuriachan as a boy when his parents who were Naxalites tied a crude bomb to themselves and detonated it. Peeyoos is not his real name. He is also a character in hiding. More than that, he is Mohan Pothan’s most loyal dog.

Soyi has to protect herself from Peeyoos too. Her dogs, trained by her husband, are friendly with Peeyoos. But they are more loyal to Soyi.

The movie is a brilliant story of how protection becomes imprisonment, how loyalty switches sides, and how people are not at all what they seem. Control is what everyone wants. Control over certain others. That craze for control or power can ruin many lives. Soyi emerges as the only heroic character when she uses her power for self-preservation rather than control over others, though she does mete out a harsh justice to Mohan Pothan.

The movie with its complex plot and characters kept me engrossed from the start to the end. The forest in which the entire plot unfolds is an added charm.

The movie ends on a highly ambiguous note. Is Kuriachan still alive, living in a cave somewhere not too far from Soyi’s watchful gaze with her dogs feeding him when she chooses? Or has he been poisoned by Soyi? The dogs who were on duty to ensure that Kuriachan doesn’t leave his cave are now, in the last scene, seen with Soyi who gives them a new task: keep Peeyoos under check.

Surveillance is an art! Power is an art! Controlling others is a devious game.