The story of Kerala is often narrated through numbers: 100% literacy, less than 0.5% absolute poverty, the highest life expectancy in the country, and the lowest infant mortality rate. These statistics form the foundation of what economists and policymakers have long hailed as the ‘Kerala model,’ an image of egalitarian, rational, and progressive governance in an otherwise fragmented nation-state. 

But these numbers, abstracted from lived reality, conceal more than they reveal. Rising inequality, debt-led consumption, mass internal migration, and ecological precarity are rendered peripheral in the glare of developmental triumph. In Kerala, barricades go up with remarkable efficiency, and sterile data points allow society and the state to ignore the vast, unseen ocean of grief and human tragedy they represent. 

Like the state, Malayalam cinema responds with characters who do not grieve but only function. From 2015 to 2025, the genre of police procedurals and investigative thrillers has steadily risen. Nearly 40 films fall under the police genre, including celebrated ones like Joseph (2018), Drishyam 2 (2021), Nayattu (2021), Kannur Squad (2023), and Narivetta (2025), with more releases forthcoming. The films are not simply entertainment, but function as ideological tools, wherein the broken social contract is displaced onto the bodies of highly exhorting, hyper-functional male protagonists, each articulating a different form of state fantasy. 

Films such as Action Hero Biju (2016), Anjaam Pathiraa (The Fifth Midnight: 2020), and Kuttavum Shikshayum (Crime and Punishment: 2022) are perfect examples. They do not just represent law enforcement—they reconstruct the neoliberal subject: overburdened, affectively regulated, and complicit in holding together a disintegrating state through performance, not politics. Cloaked in social realism, these films transform institutional failures into individual dilemmas, turn systemic violence into personal guilt, and recenter the bourgeois male subject as the last stabilizing force in a collapsing order.

In these narratives, the state does not disappear; it is sublimated into bodies that labor harder, feel deeper, and never question the structures that made them necessary. The genre’s consistent message is that the state cannot function without these exceptional individuals, even if it exists in moral ambiguity, who absorb its crises as their own personal burden, transforming political failure into a drama of masculine resolve. The storytelling through the films builds a myth of the indispensable man. 

Action Hero Biju: The Self-Appointed Protector

Action Hero Biju presents a disturbing vision of a society where institutions—be it law, the judiciary, or social welfare—create a void that is filled by a singular, authoritarian figure. It follows Sub-Inspector Biju Paulose (Nivin Pauly) through a series of short, loosely connected episodes. Biju handles a wide range of cases, from parking disputes and petty theft to romantic entanglements and attempted suicides.

Biju’s role as a self-appointed protector valorizes individual heroism to mask state withdrawal, creating a cultural politics where redemptive masculinity holds together the illusion of order. The film, directed by Abrid Shine, ideologically encodes a cultural response where conservatism is naturalized, and where inequality and authoritarianism are the norm and acceptable to people.

In one case, he deals with a man who frequently assaults people due to uncontrollable anger, leading to one victim losing a kidney. Biju punishes the offender by beating him with a coconut wrapped in cloth—a method of custodial violence. This coconut, wrapped and kept in the station, becomes a symbolic warning throughout the film. Its mere appearance signals that violence may follow. In a suicide attempt case, a mother jumps into a river with her infant child. Biju manages to save the woman, but the child dies. Biju later recounts it during an Independence Day speech at a school, to stress the importance of mental strength and resilience in life.

Action Hero Biju has about 20 such vignettes tied together not by plot but tone. What binds these fragments together is the recurring use of custodial violence and illocution. Biju not only disciplines suspects, but also lectures fellow officers and civilians on law and morality. In one case, a man sets his dog on a child for plucking mangoes from his tree. A constable with nearly 20 years of service is shown to be unsure about which section of the IPC to apply to the man. Biju then makes the constable read out Section 324 of the IPC—including the sub-clauses dealing with intentional harm using animals as weapons.

In moments like these, Biju appears less like a state functionary and more like a self-styled enforcer of virtue.

His background is deliberately overqualified: an MPhil graduate who gave up a teaching job after topping the civil service exam. This detail suggests that his authority is earned through merit, not institutional trust. Action Hero Biju effectively frames his violent enforcement not as the product of systemic failure, but as an act of virtuous personal choice. In this vein, when he misses the birth of his child to catch a criminal, it’s not shown as tragic—but as noble. The problem is that the film glorifies his personal sacrifice as helping mask the failure of public institutions. By replacing systemic justice with individual virtue and violence, the film helps recast authoritarianism as heroism.

Biju’s overcommitment, his desire, is framed as a substitute for the absence of any coherent public infrastructure. “Hara Hara Theevram Veekshanam” (“Hail Lord Shiva, the One with the Intense Gaze”), the song that plays while Biju is shown beating up people with coconuts and pummeling suspects, operates as a musical invocation of the ideal protector. The lyrics, “he is determined and dedicated … he always serves justice, he is ready to protect … he undertakes all his duties sincerely … at dire times he acts quickly and resolves the issues…,” function like a chant, constructing a near-divine image of the police hero.

The repetition of “he is ready to protect” acts as a mantra, reinforcing a sense of unwavering vigilance and moral clarity. Musically, the spunky acoustic arrangement of punchy drums, brassy trumpets, and electric guitar rhythms injects energy into this idealization, amplifying its persuasive power. Thus, the character of Biju transforms into a symbol: the embodied law, righteous and unstoppable. 

In a scene following the song, a woman is depicted as a caricature of an urban activist—with a red bindi, kurta, and anglicized Malayalam confronting Biju about police brutality. She references human rights and official protocols, only to be harshly rebuked by Biju in formal and chaste Malayalam, using the hypothetical example of her own sexual harassment to argue that the public wants swift action, not procedural restraint. The scene mocks her concerns and portrays Biju’s violence as justified, positioning even liberal ideals as naive and out of touch, valorizing authoritarian policing, and ridiculing dissent, especially from women.

Welfare systems such as mental health support, women’s protection, and rehabilitation are absent. Courts are dismissed implicitly as corrupt, where “real” justice doesn’t happen, where police aren’t under trial. In this vacuum, Biju’s performance fills the gap. He declares that his police station is the “district court, high court, and Supreme Court” of the common man, acting as judge, jury, counselor, and moral guide.

Action Hero Biju implicitly shows us a society where institutions have receded, but instead of mourning or acknowledging that absence, the protagonist fills the void with constant affective labor, which is absent in the fellow officers, the working class, the youth, or the teenagers. People who transgress social norms, such as queer youth, eloped lovers, are verbally abused and publicly disciplined under the guise of care, with the realism of the film legitimizing custodial moral policing as common sense.

The film becomes a performance where his physicality, violence, and moral lectures are not inherent but are repeatedly performed and reinforced through societal expectations of what a man in power must be: strong, decisive, and dominant. Shine constructs a narrative where masculinity, as embodied by Biju, functions as a tool for maintaining patriarchal, feudal, and state power—in opposition to liberal activists or marginalized groups. 

This is where the logic of denying institutional failure becomes central to Biju’s character as a savior. His speech is rapid, sermon-like, and often laced with rhetorical repetition. Even minor cases invite long-winded lectures that overwhelm suspects and colleagues alike. Rather than delegating or relying on institutional processes, he inserts himself as the sole moral and legal authority, turning every incident into a stage for enacting personal virtue.

He (over)acts, (over)functions, (over)believes, and (over)talks. This psychological reflex becomes a political pattern, and Biju’s denial becomes the glue that holds the fantasy of order together, allowing a broken world to be lived in without confronting its brokenness and death.

Anjaam Pathiraa: Individual Expertise Beyond the State

Where Action Hero Biju locates state function in the body of the disciplinarian, Anjaam Pathiraa shifts this function to the outsourced consultant—still individualized, but now mediated through investigative expertise of Anwar Hussain. Directed by Midhun Manuel Thomas, the film begins with the murder of DSP Abraham Koshy (Boban Samuel). Anwar Hussain (Kunchacko Boban), a psychologist, is invited by ACP Anil Madhavan (Jinu Joseph) to assist with the murder investigation. 

As killings continue, the process of detection gets outsourced to Anwar. However, the police and he realize that their cloud services have been hacked, and the character of Andrew, the hacker (Sreenath Bhasi), enters. His expertise in hacking becomes vital to cracking the investigation and ensuring that it moves forward. 

The labor of the psychologist and the hacker appears autonomous, but is structurally in service of reimposing order and bypassing democratic or legal frameworks. Anjaam Pathiraa reproduces a neoliberal paradigm: capitalist modernity manages dissent by reabsorbing it into individualized productivity and self-regulation masked as agency.

Andrew is not only a hacker, but also an ex-patient of the psychologist Anwar. He is brought in not only to solve the case, but also to be ‘disciplined’ by Anwar, and is encouraged to use his skills for ‘social good’ (social service). In a key scene, Andrew is sitting outside an ATM, remotely hacking into a machine, just as a man enters his card details into it. Using his laptop, Andrew effortlessly accesses the encrypted information that the man inputs. Just as he’s about to complete the theft of the man’s information, Andrew is caught red-handed by Anwar, who takes him directly to the police station. 

This moment marks a pivotal shift in Andrew’s role. No longer a hacker for personal gain, he is now allowed to use his skills for a greater purpose—helping solve the case under Anwar’s guidance and, in a way, being “disciplined” into contributing to the social good. From here on, the process of detection gets outsourced to him by the police. 

Anwar and Andrew’s work, once external to the state, becomes deeply entwined with their own personal stakes, reinforcing how affective labor, such as intellectual, emotional, and ethical work, is privatized and outsourced in neoliberal governance, where individuals step in to fill the gaps left by state inefficiency. Anjaam Pathiraa repeatedly portrays police as outdated and ineffective, struggling with technology, failing to prevent killings, and being mocked by Andrew’s sarcastic remarks. For example, when the officers from Kochi come to seek information about a clue, they ask for CCTV, and the constables say their station lacks CCTV because it is in a rural area implying underdevelopment.

With the fourth murder of a police officer happening under the watch of the DCP, the earlier investigations of three murders reach dead ends. The DCP is asked to step back, sidelining Andrew and Anwar. Yet, when Anwar uncovers a crucial lead in the investigation and presents it to DCP, he is accused of having previously bungled the case and is told to step back. In the next scene, the beleaguered Anwar and Andrew sit in Andrew’s house, where Andrew has taken it upon himself to continue the investigation, analyzing CCTV footage on his personal desktop. 

When Anwar suggests that he might not need Andrew’s help, Andrew reveals that the case has become personal to him, stating that the killers hacked into his firewall twice. This moment highlights how both Anwar and Andrew, though sidelined by the official investigation, step in to provide their intellectual and emotional labor. 

The key here is the shift in personal desires, where their work is no longer officially recognized or commissioned by the state. They take on these roles individually and voluntarily, without formal acknowledgment or compensation from state institutions. The investigation becomes privatized because Anwar and Andrew continue their work outside the system, driven by personal motivations rather than official state duties. Their intellectual, emotional, and ethical labor is self-directed and self-regulated. In a neoliberal context, the state outsources responsibility for solving problems of its own making, pushing individuals to fill the gaps with their private expertise, consultancy, personal stakes, and affective labor. 

Rather than dismantling the state’s logic, Anwar and Andrew restore order but outside legal frameworks, through freelance expertise. In today’s economy, power doesn’t work through top-down control but through flexible work, emotional effort, and informal expertise. Surveillance is no longer imposed from above. It becomes something individuals take on themselves, believing it to be virtuous or efficient. 

Kuttavum Shikshayum: When Private Guilt Substitutes Public Justice

Kuttavum Shikshayum begins with a jolt from the unconscious: CI Sajan Philip (Asif Ali) is haunted by a dream where he shoots a protester, an event from his past that sets the film’s mood. The film, directed by Rajeev Ravi, opens on a tense confrontation on a hilly field. A group of police officers face off against protestors, who are demanding the redistribution of 250,000 acres from a large estate to the people. The standoff escalates when a protester hurls a stone at Sajan.

This snowballs into a volley of stone pelting from the crowd at the police line. A rock strikes an officer standing beside Sajan, injuring his ear. In a swift, retaliatory act—ostensibly in self-defense—Sajan raises his weapon and fires a single shot into the chest of the protestor. 

In Ravi’s imagination, the figure of CI Sajan Philip initially appears to break from the affective pattern of earlier Malayalam police films like Action Hero Biju and Anjaam Pathiraa. Unlike the disciplinary exuberance of Biju, or the forensic detachment of Andrew, Sajan is marked by guilt, insomnia, and a quiet, internalized grief over the killing of a protestor—a violence sanctioned but subsequently erased by the state. 

Sajan’s inner burden never surfaces publicly, but casts a long shadow over everything he does. Unmarried and single, he descends into depression, seeking solace in cigarettes, alcohol, and pills that grant him sleep. Even then, sleep evades him. Emotionally reticent and economical with words, his face is almost permanently etched with worry. Yet, within that quietude, he is shown to express grace: the space to empathize with the person opposite him.

Yet, Sajan’s grief does not lead to rupture or political reckoning; instead, it becomes a private burden that lets him continue working. The protestor is not remembered or named—he exists only as a trigger for the officer’s internal crisis. Thus, Kuttavum Shikshayum performs a deeper negation: state violence is not denied outright but is reconfigured as a personal burden. Sajan quietly returns to work, managing his emotions without ever challenging the system that caused his guilt. Mourning, here, does not oppose or turn the law on its head—but preserves it.

The narrative is set in Kattappana, Idukki, a town suspended between rural inertia and creeping urbanization. Mornings begin with birdsong; the streets remain empty of commuters and vehicles. A lone cyclist pedals without urgency through the landscape.

The cyclist notices a seemingly straightforward theft at a jewelry store, triggering the story. Despite the presence of CCTV, the footage is unusable. The store owner, marked by his wealth with a gold chain, bracelet, and high-end phone, initially claims a loss of 2.67 kg of gold and 3 kg of silver. When pressed by CI Sajan for an exact figure, he peevishly revises it down to 1.870 kg of gold. This discrepancy prompts Sajan’s sharp rebuke: the faulty CCTV was likely not an oversight, but a deliberate choice, motivated by the potential for profit rather than a genuine need for security.

By framing the lapse as the result of individual greed and fraud, the narrative tries to establish that the system is compromised by dishonest civilians. The police perform the role of moral arbiters, exposing this deceit. The audience is led to side with Sajan’s sharp deduction, thus validating the institution’s role and reinforcing the performance of order. 

Sajan forms a core investigation team with officers Basheer (Alencier Ley Lopez), Rajesh (Sunny Wayne), and Abin (Sharafudeen). Operating in civilian clothing, the unit depends on informal networks consisting of pimps, prostitutes, garage owners, autorickshaw drivers, and under-the-radar connections. Clues eventually lead them north—to Dhanaganj in Uttar Pradesh—where the alleged culprits reside. 

As the Kerala officers start traveling to northern India, they are introduced to a different policing culture. Their first encounter with the local context is immediate: while the officers are stopped for tea, a local attempts to break into their parked car, establishing an environment of pervasive, opportunistic crime—unlike Kerala, where there are CCTVs and police patrolling.

This perception is formally confirmed in their first meeting with the local Superintendent of Police (SP). He explicitly warns the Kerala team that they are entering an area where development has been abandoned and political promises routinely vanish. His assessment is stark: in the absence of a legitimate opportunity, “every second person is a criminal.”

Throughout, Sajan remains ethically rigid but emotionally frayed. He refuses custodial violence during interrogation to avoid worsening his inner conflict, marking Kerala Police as more humane. When a suspect escapes due to Officer Rajesh’s error, Sajan finally snaps—not to dominate, but to demand a seriousness he sees eroding in the TikTok-inflected, distracted junior officer. Sajan’s old-world commitment to duty stands in opposition to the generational failure represented by the younger officers, whose distractions undermine the seriousness of their work. 

While Kuttavum Shikshayum clearly borrows the moral scaffolding of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it fundamentally diverges from its source material. In a pivotal scene before the final raid, Sajan confesses to Basheer that he once shot and killed a man. He describes the unbearable guilt of taking a life, a guilt compounded by a system that erased all traces of the act. There was no inquiry, no justice—only a silence that has consumed him from within. Unlike Raskolnikov’s journey, which culminates in public turmoil and legal reckoning, Sajan’s guilt remains a private burden, a secret between two colleagues.

This act of internalization performs one more curious sleight of hand: it centers the criminal’s anguish, while allowing the victim and the crime itself to fade into obscurity. We learn nothing of the protester who was killed or the community that was wounded. Ultimately, the institution is absolved, and the heavy, private weight of guilt becomes a substitute for public justice.

This narrow focus is mirrored in the film’s geographical and social framing. It carefully projects an image of Kerala’s development being linked to lower crime and rational thinking, a point underscored by the revelation that the thieves are migrants from Uttar Pradesh. This displacement of the crime onto a body, who is a migrant and an outsider, is one of the plinths upon which the binary of the narrative of Kerala is created. When the successful operation concludes and the thieves are brought to Kerala, the system deflates the entire endeavor: they are immediately granted bail, with the dismissive verdict, “after all, it’s just a theft.” 

In Basheer’s mourning of this futility, Kuttavum Shikshayum finds its final, convenient excuse. It never dares to pose the more difficult question: how we are all implicated in the same carceral system and the same modern nation-state. Sajan quietly agrees. And yet, by the end, Sajan no longer needs alcohol to sleep. His confession, perhaps, has done what the law could not: restore fragility. The film closes with the officers en route to another case. Sajan’s return to work, seemingly restored, signals how personal grief is managed to maintain functionality rather than spark systemic change. But this grief becomes complicit when it is privatized and disconnected from a structural critique.

The closure offered to Sajan restores functionality—a return to work. In doing so, it mirrors the genre’s wider logic: converting crisis into labor, mourning into management. 

Ideology and the Kerala Model: Representing Stability Amid Collapse

The development trope that one sees in a film like Kuttavum Shikshayum doesn’t lay its hand on the life loss and dispossession brought by structural adjustments, landslides, cloud bursts, floods, high digital participation, or demonetization in Kerala.

If the bourgeois subjects in these films actually confronted the failure of institutions, they would be forced to confront economic decay, mass migrations from north to south in search of a better life, rising authoritarianism and fascism; acknowledge the fantasy of the ‘Kerala model’, irreversible ecological loss, and death that cannot be turned into a redemptive narrative. 

The result of such a confrontation would be a collapse of the ideological armature that keeps bourgeois subjectivity intact—especially in regions like Kerala, where modernity was premised on literacy, economic planning, and egalitarian aspiration. This rupture would force a reckoning not just with grief, but with complicity: that bourgeois stability was built on precarity elsewhere—on domestic labor, caste atrocities, environmental extraction.

This logic of substitution, visible in all three films, aligns with the broader ideological function of Malayalam police procedurals: to re-stabilize bourgeois subjectivity and disavow their complicity amid disintegration. As seen in Action Hero Biju, the protagonist’s refusal to stop, rest, or grieve—his moral surplus—is what makes him an ideal neoliberal subject. He performs the state’s role, not because the law compels him, but because he believes the crisis is due to the law not being invoked enough.

Biju rants against human rights activists and politicians—not as ideological enemies, but as distractions from the order he believes he must uphold. For Anwar, the system is too slow and broken, and justice requires his personal expediency, expertise, and investment. His intelligence is not just a tool, but a moral obligation to act outside the rules. It allows Biju or Anwar to continue performing the fantasy of justice, embodying the ideal subject of neoliberal capitalism: endlessly productive, internally regulated, righteous, and willing to bear the burdens of a collapsing state. 

In Action Hero Biju, Anjaam Pathiraa, and Kuttavum Shikshayum, social realism is recast through the performative labor of protagonists whose authority is made legible within specific social and institutional contexts. Grief, guilt, and procedural diligence transform state violence such as custodial brutality and extrajudicial murders into affective and personal burdens. These performances are not innate traits but socially intelligible acts shaped by caste, class, bureaucratic status, and regional modernity. 

Women, queer subjects, and other marginalized figures largely remain invisible, performing care, domestic labor, or serving as triggers for the protagonists’ ethical action. Their suffering is instrumentalized to produce a dispositional order in which certain lives are ungrievable. Social realism thus becomes a mode of containment: it channels emotion and legitimizes state authority by making the grief and labor of the socially privileged intelligible, while rendering marginalized experiences invisible. The “real” is constructed as a hierarchy of affective legibility where social and state violence is absorbed into the psychic labor of those who can perform its intelligibility. 

These performative labors do more than define the protagonists’ ethical worlds. They are also the mechanisms through which neoliberal governance and state authority are internally reproduced.

Capital no longer needs to offer social security as modern nation-states under liberalism did. The protagonists’ behavioral surplus and hyper-function is not a subsidy that saves the system, but is, in fact, the system’s intended product, leading to depoliticized subjects who internalize the failure as their own personal mission. People need not question what discourses of development do to land, nor ask the state about its policies, laws, or where their tax-paying money is going. As long as individuals continue to generate surplus moral labor, they make the crisis appear natural and its resolution a matter of individual ethics, thereby concealing capital’s role as the deliberate architect of the disorder. 

Cinema, then, becomes an extension of soft statecraft: discipline is affective and internalized. These films do not simply depict policing—they participate in the ‘policing of crisis’, a cultural operation that responds to the erosion of public trust, economic precarity, broken federalism, a strained relationship with the Center, and the threat of dissent by re-securing bourgeois hegemony through affect and representation.

The three films show how denial, neoliberalism, and capital work together to produce a subject who carries the weight of a disintegrated system. Yet they never ask why Biju, Anwar, or Sajan need to do so much. Instead, it celebrates their endless energy. This is the heart of the films’ argument: without stable systems, the burden shifts to the individual.

Structural conditions like migration, land patterns, poverty, caste, and labor exploitation are not denied but reframed through individualized tropes of professionalism. What is produced is a world which is broken, but the cop, who is flawed and humane, still holds it together. The marginalized are not entirely erased, but re-enter only as objects of regulation or correction.

But to make the private a public would then demand a different form of imagination, where the social and political are not abandoned. The bourgeoisie, in such a moment, would no longer be able to imagine itself as the savior or stabilizer. It would have to see itself as the limit, the blockage to acceleration. Authority and technocratic fantasy at the heart of films like Anjaam Pathiraa or Action Hero Biju would become unbearable. In short, opening the wound would mean no longer telling the story not from anyone’s point of view, but from the dispossessed. But the suturing is careful. 

These films, and the genre as such, do not mourn the state’s abandonment of people, disappearance of social cohesion, or loneliness (also exacerbated by digital media). Instead, they find new ways to articulate its functions through male protagonists. This ideological function is what allows the Kerala model to persist in the national imagination as coherent and stable. Thus, would it suffice to say that beneath the projection of the development model, what exists is an increasingly brittle zone of attrition?