Abstract
This article examines the Malayalam film Ullozhukku, directed by Christo Tomy, as a meditation on feminist ethics, affective complexity and intergenerational trauma within Kerala’s layered social structure, which is entangled by patriarchal, class and caste systems. Progressing beyond the familiar feminist tropes of resistance and empowerment, the film presents ethically complicated women who strategically navigate betrayal, care and survival in a system that was never built for them. This article contends that Ullozhukku destabilises the various binaries of victim and agent, complicity and resistance, care and harm, offering a view of feminism that is grounded in contradiction, affective entanglement and endurance. It suggests that the women in the film cannot be neatly positioned as either oppressed or complicit but inhabit ethically complicated spaces shaped by kinship, obligation and systemic constraint. The film foregrounds the texture of everyday life as a space where feminist meaning is lived and negotiated in unfamiliar forms. The article draws on the work of feminist thinkers including Deniz Kandiyoti, who conceptualises the patriarchal bargain, and Uma Chakravarti, who examines how class, kinship and gender mediate survival and complicity. It also draws from trauma studies, engaging Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory and Cathy Caruth’s framing of trauma as belated and unassimilable, and from Sara Ahmed’s and Leela Gandhi’s concepts of sticky objects and affective communities in the field of affect studies. Aspects from hydrofeminism and spatial theory help examine how spatial conditions, particularly floodwaters, catalyse emotional exposure and relational transformation. This interdisciplinary framework situates the film within a transnational feminist conversation that is attentive to ambiguity and the difficult ethics of survival. Rather than arriving at conclusive moral judgments, this research proposes that Ullozhukku articulates a feminism that emerges from the contradictions of ordinary lives, where agency, interdependence, survival and quiet acts of care form the basis of feminist possibility.
Introduction
Malayalam cinema – or Mollywood – is a dynamic industry that is especially known for its socially relevant narratives grounded in realism and focused on complex human relationships (Wolfcrow, 2023). Despite being a regional industry, Mollywood possesses an intense ecosystem of film societies, criticism and festival cultures, further challenged by Kerala’s audiences (Kerala State Chalachithra Academy, 2024; Shahina, 2025). The impact of Malayalam cinema has extended beyond the screen into institutional politics, often shaping what audiences understand as progressive or regressive cinema (Pillai, 2017). Despite being celebrated for its reformist sensibility, Malayalam cinema has consistently been highlighted by feminist scholarship for its engagement with gender, shaped by complex anxieties around class, caste, sexuality and family (Karthika, 2022). In early Malayalam cinema, women on screen were positioned as bearers of cultural purity and social order, possessing a domesticated and morally disciplined femininity (Rajendran, 2014). Despite embracing a strong tradition of serious or auteur filmmaking, films that critically explored social injustice often used women’s suffering as a plot point to amplify the male’s struggles, thereby ensuring that the male-centred visual authority is not entirely displaced. The focus on realism failed to undo the male gaze as women’s inner lives were frequently filtered through suffering and sacrifice. Emotional depth was acknowledged only as long as it reinforced the ideals of familial obligation rather than autonomous desire.
In the last decade, however, Malayalam cinema has demonstrated a shift in its engagement with gender, accompanied by visible public debates around misogyny, authorship and representation. Films such as How Old Are You? (2014) foregrounded middle-aged women’s journey of self-discovery and recovery, paving the way for similar films with an empowerment arc. Such narratives were largely authored within male-dominated creative frameworks that generated socially acceptable scripts of empowerment without addressing women’s interiority and lived contradictions. However, The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) marked a turning point by centring domestic labour and marital routine within feminist critique and revealing patriarchy’s brutality. Ariyippu (2022) and Aattam (2023) examined sexual harassment and institutional silence through nuanced conversations and moral deadlocks, rather than through sensational or voyeuristic portrayals. Despite the myriad barriers posed by structural and sociocultural inequities, women directors have created critically engaging films and are gradually reshaping the industry from within. Films such as B 32 Muthal 44 Vare (2023), directed by Shruthi Sharanyam, dealt with women’s bodily autonomy and cross-class solidarities, centring everyday negotiations of shame and desire in ways that resist male-gaze-driven narrative closure. Kunjila Mascillamani’s Asanghadithar (2022) offered a stark, realistic portrayal of women’s labour struggles and emotional fatigue by revealing how access to basic sanitation can turn dignity, labour and bodily endurance into sites of feminist resistance within ordinary urban life. Additionally, Jeo Baby’s Kaathal –The Core (2023) explored queer vulnerability within a mainstream family setting by examining not only the closeted gay man’s crisis but also the emotional turmoil and ethical displacement experienced by his wife, thereby broadening the frame of trauma and care beyond male identities. Christo Tomy’s film Ullozhukku (2024) can be situated within this cinematic trajectory.
Ullozhukku, whose title translates to ‘The Undercurrent’, is an exploration of grief, betrayal and emotional entanglement that unfolds amidst a slowly rising flood in Kuttanad, Kerala. Set within the confines of a house flooded by relentless rain, the film revolves around Anju (played by Parvathy Thiruvothu) and her mother-in-law, Leelamma (played by Urvashi). As the rising floodwaters postpone the burial of Anju’s husband, Thomaskutty (played by Prasant Murali), physical movement becomes increasingly restricted and emotional histories begin to resurface, revealing wounds that have been long submerged.
This article examines Ullozhukku through the intersecting frameworks of trauma theory, affect theory and feminist ethics. While trauma studies in cinema have typically foregrounded large-scale violence or psychological rupture, Ullozhukku probes quieter manifestations that are woven through memory, care, betrayal and shared daily life. It articulates a feminism rooted not in moral clarity or defiance but in survival within limitations, where betrayal, care, resistance and complicity coexist. Feminism here emerges through emotional entanglement and everyday endurance, devoid of overt acts of liberation or resolution. By doing so, the film articulates the lives of women often excluded from dominant historical or cinematic narratives.
This article is structured as follows. The first section presents a discourse on the representation of women in Malayalam cinema. Using suitable theoretical frameworks from trauma, affect and feminist theories, the core of the article lies in the analysis and discussion section, which examines four interrelated aspects: women’s decisions as situated acts of survival; the emotional undercurrents of inherited trauma; the fragile networks of care shaped by guilt, resentment and obligation; and the spatial dynamics, particularly the floodwaters, which catalyse affective transformation. The article concludes by positioning Ullozhukku as a significant contribution to both regional trauma cinema and feminist film studies.
Representation of women in Malayalam cinema
In the early decades of Malayalam cinema, from the 1950s to the 1970s, women’s roles were primarily framed within traditional moral orders that prioritised dutifulness, sacrifice and familial obligation. Later, women were often depicted as mothers whose emotional labour sustained households, romantic interests positioned within the male-centred (Pillai, 2010: 8–9) or helpless sisters whose weddings became narrative conveniences to highlight the responsibility and authority of the male hero. Within this representational tradition, women’s morality was largely articulated only through their relation to men and to patriarchal family structures, where duty, emotional labour and adherence to conservative family norms functioned as markers of virtue rather than as expressions of autonomous moral agency (Pillai, 2010: 21). Within this context, film director KG George emerged as a pivotal figure in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing a layered, psychologically grounded focus on women’s inner lives in films such as Adaminte Variyellu (1984), which revolved around three women negotiating identity and dignity within patriarchal structures. However, such mindful representations remained rare or unevenly articulated, leaving much of Malayalam cinema in the subsequent decades susceptible to the rise of macho-centric commercial forms, especially in the 2000s. Assertive male heroism became a dominant template in these mainstream narratives, often operating through a male gaze that positioned women as objects of spectacle or as ‘fancy’ props within male-driven plots (Pillai, 2010: 10). The commercial success of these films reflected their cultural resonance, even when they normalised patriarchal dominance. The female characters endorsed those hierarchies and applauded male dominance.
As Malayalam cinema has evolved, however, women-centred narratives from the 2010s onwards have increasingly foregrounded arcs of personal transformation, resistance or reclamation to shape the idea of female agency. In turn, scholarship on Malayalam cinema’s gender politics has grown and deepened, with Meena T. Pillai’s (2010, 2017) work, which critically and consistently examines how gender, masculinity and cinematic culture intersect in Kerala society, becoming foundational to these studies. 22 Female Kottayam (2012) conveys a revenge-driven empowerment in which the protagonist Tessa’s calculated retaliation against sexual violence and betrayal reflects a clear enactment of agency. Uyare (2019) centres a mode of aspirational recovery in the wake of an acid attack, although its culminating arc in which the survivor becomes a flight attendant was critiqued as more idealised than strictly realist. Films like How Old Are You? (2014) frame autonomy through visible career transformation and the successful balancing of professional and familial identities. Collectively, these films have been crucial in not only shaping public discourse on women’s agency but also revealing how mainstream narratives portrayed agency through decisive action or resolution. However, films such as The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) and Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) reveal the stark reality of women in everyday domestic spaces by unveiling benevolent sexism, routine kitchen labour and manipulative, controlling relationships. Both films deliberately take on a message-orientated structure that culminates in decisive outcomes that affirm women’s right to exit oppressive marriages – an intentional narrative choice that contributed to their impact and wide public discussion. Despite their social impact, this narrative tendency still points to a representational gap: comparatively less attention is paid to stories where women’s agency is not best expressed through exit or self-discovery but through survival-orientated decision making and ethically complex negotiations within relationships that cannot be easily abandoned.
These questions become more analytically rewarding when juxtaposed with the broader scholarship on trauma, care and space. Trauma studies in cinema largely centre on visible atrocities such as war, disaster, violence or historical catastrophe (Salberg, 2024: 7), with trauma being articulated through flashbacks or psychological breakdowns. Such event-based frameworks align readily with conventional cinematic structures, providing clear narrative stakes, historical anchoring and easier emotional intensity. By contrast, diffuse, cumulative or emotionally ambivalent forms of indirect suffering within domestic life have received less sustained attention because such experiences do not stem from a singular catastrophic event but emerge gradually from everyday structures and normalised social conditions.
Although feminist ethics has established care as a critical site of moral and political enquiry, in cinema, care is still frequently framed through limited moral frameworks of selflessness, redemption or sacrifice (Pillai, 2010: 8); consequently, representations of care that are conditional, emotionally fraught or intertwined with resentment, guilt and obligation are comparatively underexamined. While spatial analysis in film scholarship has productively examined how landscapes, architecture and crises shape narrative progression, environmental disruptions such as floods are frequently interpreted symbolically or as narrative catalysts that propel plot development superficially. Studies have paid less attention to how such conditions could gradually reshape emotional lives and interactions over time, beyond their immediate narrative or symbolic functions.
Within these intersecting conversations and combined gaps, Ullozhukku can be positioned as a significant intervention in contemporary Malayalam cinema, as recent scholarship has begun to situate the film within feminist and psychoanalytic frameworks. Reshma Venugopal (2024) interprets the floodwaters through a hydrofeminist lens as articulations of repressed grief, while Sweta Mukherjee et al. (2025) note the film’s departure from the conventional ‘tragic widow’ trope. Such readings signal an emerging recognition of the film’s complexity. Yet, placed within broader trauma and feminist scholarship – which has historically privileged Euro-American narratives – the film’s emphasis on grief, relational secrecy and ethical ambiguity within ordinary life remains comparatively underexplored. Set against a flood-affected landscape in Kuttanad, the film treats crisis not as mere spectacle or narrative trigger but as an ongoing condition through which grief, secrecy, obligation and ethical conflict are negotiated. Rather than organising the women characters around an established empowerment arc, it remains attentive to the affective undercurrents of trauma, contradictions of care and ways in which space mediates ethical decision making within constrained environments, thereby inviting a novel reading of trauma, feminist relationality and spatial affect in regional cinema.
Analysis and discussion
A means of strategic survival
In Ullozhukku, the choices of Anju, her mother-in-law Leelamma and her mother Jiji are ethically complex, driven by the imperative to survive within the systems of caste, class, patriarchy and familial duty.
Anju’s father vehemently opposes her relationship with Rajeev because he is not a Christian like them and has no stable employment. Denied the freedom to marry for love, Anju marries Thomaskutty out of resignation, catering to his needs as a dutiful wife despite having no affectionate feelings for him. The marriage becomes a site of silent suffering for Anju as she becomes a caregiver to her ailing husband. Anju’s mind and body become overburdened and emotionally depleted with ritual and expectations. Consequently, the affair she starts with Rajeev unfolds as a longing for connection and a desperate attempt to reclaim her emotional and bodily agency, more than being driven by rebellion. It continues as an instinctual act against the slow-burning trauma of emotional suffocation, resulting in her body becoming the battleground for class and familial anxieties, where desire is policed and trauma is buried. Around the time that Anju realises she is pregnant with Rajeev’s baby, Thomaskutty’s health condition worsens. After Thomaskutty’s sudden death, the period leading up to his burial confines Anju in the household, gradually exposing her secrets. As they hear the truth, Anju’s father is less concerned about her struggle than about the dishonour she brings to her late husband’s family. Adamant that Anju cannot return to Rajeev, despite there being no reason for her to stay, he slaps his pregnant daughter and warns her: ‘Daughter, remember this! Do not ever dream of living with that jobless Hindu boy’ (Ullozhukku, 2024: 1:10:08–1:10:14). Uma Chakravarti’s (1993: 585) concept of Brahmanical patriarchy helps explain how class and gender hierarchies shape women’s roles and force them to sustain systems of oppression. This incident in the film exemplifies the patriarchal system that emphasises how women’s sexuality is strictly guarded (Chakravarti, 1993: 579–581) to preserve caste purity, male honour and patrilineal descent. Unlike class, the aspect of caste is not explicitly addressed in the film – a tendency that mirrors much of mainstream Malayalam cinema (Manoj, 2025). Anju’s decisions serve as adaptations to a system where women’s choices are filtered through duty, shame and permitted actions. Her past becomes a wound that is weaponised against her, even though it was shaped by loss, trauma and denial. Anju’s decision, therefore, functions both as a subversion and as a survival strategy – an act of endurance in the face of systems that would rather see her disappear than live on her own terms.
Anju’s mother, Jiji, who knew of Thomaskutty’s illness before the wedding, withholds the truth from her daughter to orchestrate a marriage deemed socially acceptable. When confronted by Anju about her lie of omission, Jiji tries to justify her actions and says, ‘I never thought things would end up like this. I wanted you to be happy … As it was an alliance from a good family … Do you think I would harm you on purpose?’ (Ullozhukku, 2024: 1:24:59–1:25:16). According to Chakravarti (1993: 585, 580), women across caste and class hierarchies subscribe to ideologies of caste and patriarchy even when it oppresses them primarily because it offers conditional protection and social legitimacy. This mirrors Deniz Kandiyoti’s (1988: 274) concept of the patriarchal bargain, where women trade certain freedoms for the relative safety of membership in a caste-honouring household. Jiji’s act, although painful for Anju, is motivated by a desire to secure a respectable status and a financially secure life for her daughter within a rigid social structure.
Leelamma’s concealment of Thomaskutty’s illness and her insistence on Anju’s arranged marriage can also be understood through the lens of the patriarchal bargain. Upper-caste women often become enforcers of patriarchal norms because deviation could threaten caste purity and family honour (Chakravarti, 1993: 579). In the context of classic South Asian patriarchy, women marry young, move into their husband’s household and are expected to submit to the authority of their husband’s family (Kandiyoti, 1988: 278–279). They are promised security and eventual influence only after producing sons. Married at 19, Leelamma was widowed when her children were in college and left unmoored without a patriarch to anchor the household. In the absence of her husband, her sense of security and social worth became invested in her children, especially her son, and the continuation of the family line. Leelamma tells Anju, ‘My husband and my children were my world’ (Ullozhukku, 2024: 0:14:54–0:14:58). Despite being an intelligent woman who aspired to be a doctor, Leelamma was denied that path and was raised to find her identity within domesticity. Even after her husband’s passing, Leelamma continues to commit her life to caregiving, sacrifice and upholding the structures that once upheld her. Ailing Thomaskutty is her last link to stability and legacy. The prospect of a grandchild, especially in a patriarchal system that ties meaning to lineage, promises emotional and social continuity. Her silence is not born of malice but of a survival strategy deeply rooted in learned submission. Like Anju, Leelamma exercises agency but within the narrow confines permitted by patriarchy. She manipulates the system not to dominate but to hold on to what little she has. Her actions, although ethically fraught, emerge from fear of abandonment and a desperate clinging to familial order. Through her, the film exposes how patriarchy not only oppresses women but also trains them to internalise and reproduce its logics for survival.
The choices made by Leelamma and Jiji in Ullozhukku occupy a liminal space between complicity and agency – between upholding patriarchy and surviving within it. While these characters cater to the patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti, 1988: 274) that will ensure lineage, reputation and social order, even at the cost of another woman’s freedom, Anju ultimately breaks this bargain. Her refusal to suppress her desire, her emotional collapse and her affair with Rajeev – despite its extreme social consequences – reveals a rejection of this conditional script for women’s lives. Her defiance, however messy, emerges not only from rebellion but also from a place of exhaustion and longing. As Saba Mahmood (2006: 42) argues, agency is not always loud or liberatory; it can take the form of subtle negotiation within norms. In Ullozhukku, the bargains struck and the silences held are less about empowerment or betrayal and more about navigating a world where women’s choices are painfully limited, and survival is the only real freedom available.
Ultimately, Ullozhukku refuses to reduce women’s actions to binaries of resistance or submission. The choices made by Anju, Leelamma and Jiji are deeply entangled in fear, duty and social constraint. Whether through silence, complicity or defiance, each woman navigates her limited options, making decisions that are less about power and more about endurance. These are not acts of rebellion but survival strategies and ways of staying afloat within systems designed to drown them. The film reveals a form of feminism that does not lie in rule breaking but in the painful art of strategically surviving rules that were never made for women.
The undercurrent of trauma
In Ullozhukku, trauma is not loud or singular. It is what Cathy Caruth (1995: 5, 1996c: 18) calls an unclaimed experience – something that is not fully grasped in the moment of crisis but that resurfaces later in dreams, silences, gestures or repetitions. It festers in the folds of everyday life as overworked gestures, accustomed silences and long-held compromises. The women in the film are not victims of a catastrophe but of slow, accumulated wounds that include emotional exhaustion, deferred desires, misrecognition and the quiet violence of social conformity.
Anju’s marriage becomes a site of daily depletion. Surrendering to her fate, she tends to a dying husband with dutiful, reluctant kindness, even allowing Thomaskutty physical intimacy, despite her body clearly recoiling. This unspoken resignation stems from the assumption that violation is inevitable, which creates an embodied trauma that slowly chips away at her well-being. As a caregiver, what begins as tolerance slips into a slow-burning distress that emerges from prolonged emotional labour without relief. Described in clinical literature as compassion fatigue (Coetzee and Klopper, 2010: 239), it evolves progressively through constant exposure to another’s suffering, sustained emotional self-exertion and the absence of genuine rest or recognition. In Anju’s case, this does not render her lifeless or without desire. On the contrary, she continues to seek connection, finds intimacy in her affair with Rajeev and ventures into complex emotional terrain. However, Thomaskutty’s death marks a visible shift. Although she sheds tears, her body appears drained – almost expressionless – with grief, relief and guilt existing in uneasy coexistence. It is a reaction not just to his absence but also to the lifting of a long, unnamed burden. Her trauma lives in this ambivalence, communicated in the way her face holds back emotion, in the quietness of her collapse and in the haunting silence that follows. Her eventual breakdown is not a dramatic rebellion but a weary eruption, a final, frustrated release that seems muted to others but is charged with everything she can no longer contain. When her father hits her, she unravels and shouts through her tears: ‘Didn’t I beg you to let me marry Rajeev? You forced me to marry Thomaskutty … How many times have I told you, Mother, that I was rotting here … That I was fed up. She asked me to bear it. Haven’t I till now? I can’t bear it any longer. I can’t’ (Ullozhukku, 2024: 1:09.23–1:09:41). In reply, Anju’s father ignores his daughter, turns to Thomaskutty’s sister and says, ‘I will ensure that your family name is not ruined’ (Ullozhukku, 2024: 1:09:55–1:09:58). Under the weight of being neglected, watched, judged and emotionally starved, Anju’s trauma denotes a slow erosion of mind, body and self. Thomaskutty’s death does not end the trauma; it merely alters its form. Anju’s grief is not just about loss but is layered with the guilt of carrying another man’s baby. She dreams of Thomaskutty pressing her pregnant belly and laughing maniacally. This scene enacts what Caruth (1995: 4, 1996b: 92) describes as trauma’s return in the symbolic and fragmented form: a voice that is not fully heard at the time of the traumatic event but which returns later, belatedly and indirectly in the form of symptoms, nightmares and bodily collapse.
However, it is not only the past that disturbs Anju; if Anju had once hoped that Thomaskutty’s death would free her to reunite with Rajeev, that hope is quickly clouded by Leelamma’s suffocating affection. Leelamma clings to Anju and the unborn baby with a desperate intensity as she readies the cradle, stitches clothes and insists that Anju stay in the house. Even gestures meant as care become extensions of control. Anju’s trauma, then, stems not just from what she has lost but from the relentless impossibility of escape from patriarchy, rituals and the burdens projected onto her by others’ grief. Additionally, the film’s subdued tone – involving rain, darkness and flooding while Thomaskutty’s corpse awaits burial – visually amplifies this buried pain. Like Caruth’s (1996a: 4) understanding of trauma as a wound that cries out, but not in conventional language, Anju’s experience is never fully declared but saturates the atmosphere like the rising floodwaters.
This aching accumulation of duty, longing and silence is not Anju’s alone. Leelamma’s life, too, is marked by quiet deprivation and unspoken wounds. Married as a teenager, denied the chance to become a doctor by her parents, neglected by a husband who offered no intimacy and widowed while still young, Leelamma funnelled all her meaning into family, especially towards her chronically ill son, Thomaskutty. During one of her most devastating outbursts, Anju lashes out: ‘You would never understand the love Rajeev and I have for each other because your husband never gave you that’ (Ullozhukku, 2024: 1:29:08–1:29:16). Leelamma remains silent, but the wound registers as her face betrays the weight of a truth too long endured.
Caring for Thomaskutty consumed Leelamma’s days, tying her to routines of sacrifice that masked her own grief. Her identity being tethered to caregiving routines left little room for her own dreams. After his death, Leelamma’s maternal grief skyrockets. Even before the funeral, she devotes herself to preparing for the baby. Her sorrow does not take the form of speech; instead, it moves through materials and routines. Leelamma processes pain not by naming it but through the quiet, repetitive acts of domestic life. In these gestures, her trauma is not just remembered but lived, stitched into the very fabric of her everyday actions (Warin and Dennis, 2008: 113). This manic insistence on continuity and control is her way of escaping the void left behind; it is not just about rituals but about survival.
Leelamma’s need for order and belonging folds her trauma into Anju’s already fraying world. The pressure she places on Anju is not merely the demand of a controlling mother-in-law but the cry of someone terrified of abandonment and erasure. Bound to Anju through an affinal relationship, Leelamma’s sense of kinship becomes precarious after Thomaskutty’s death – her only remaining connection to the family is now through Anju and the unborn child. Her affection transforms into dependency, and Anju becomes not just a daughter-in-law but the final remnant of a life Leelamma refuses to lose. Here, trauma embeds itself in the fabric of the everyday – in meals, cloth and conversation – as the quiet residue of brokenness. As ethnographic accounts of gendered domestic life suggest (Warin and Dennis, 2008: 113), it is through these mundane acts that trauma is not simply recalled but enacted – incorporated into bodily routines, repeatedly reworked and re-remembered through gestures that escape language. Anju, already exhausted, finds herself unable to break free. She longs for Rajeev, but Thomaskutty’s death does not liberate her. Instead, Leelamma’s suffocating love replaces her dying husband’s presence. Although the hope of escape flickers and she can pursue it, she fears what Leelamma will do in her absence. The trauma continues, looping forward, not back.
These women’s traumas are not isolated but generational. For example, Anju’s parents, marked by the trauma of poverty and class-based shame, want their daughter to have a better chance at life. They want her to succeed on their terms. However, their idea of a better life is only a more palatable form of control, and their vision of success demands the same submission they once endured. Their fears, silences and quiet resignations are passed down to Anju, who is punished for dreaming differently. According to Hirsch, the past is not only remembered but also emotionally absorbed by those who come after. Anju is reacting not to a single moment (Hirsch, 2008: 125) but to a life conditioned by accumulated grief.
The relationship between Anju and Leelamma is defined by a rigid, filial structure – daughter-in-law and mother-in-law – in which they are expected to occupy predetermined positions within a familial hierarchy and reproduce established scripts of authority, endurance and rivalry. However, the film allows a subtle deviation. In moments of fatigue and quiet recognition, Leelamma and Anju allow each other a fragile space. Leela Gandhi’s (2006: 26) formulation of friendship as the co-belonging of nonidentical singularities offers a vocabulary for this aspect. Gandhi (2006: 25, 27–28) critiques communities grounded in blood, nation or resemblance and imagines, instead, forms of relationality that do not require sameness or possession. Anju and Leelamma neither completely overcome their conflict nor become allies in a declarative sense. What emerges is a restrained openness that holds the potential for them to tear each other down – in other words, their relationship makes proximity bearable without requiring alignment (Gandhi, 2006: 26). The bond that flickers between them is not solidarity founded on resemblance but a muted recognition of each other’s singular suffering within the same constrained space. Their relationship does not shift through grand reconciliation but through mutual exhaustion, fragile gestures and the soft realisation that they are both victims. Although they do not cease to hurt one another, they tentatively begin to witness one another. Their care that coexists with past betrayal is not perfect, but it is all they have. Their solidarity, born from grief rather than from ideology, is what denotes an ethical intimacy forged through brokenness. Meals are still cooked. Hands reach out, even hesitantly. These fragile acts of connection, seemingly mundane yet profound, form the bridge to the next section, which examines care and relational survival.
The network of care
The feminist ethics in Ullozhukku do not cater to a moral high ground. Rather, they emerge as fragile, emotionally tangled acts of care shared between people who are also hurting each other. The film proposes a relational feminism, where betrayal can coexist with love and resentment can still make way for compassion. This type of feminism embraces contradiction but is deeply human.
The evolving relationship between Leelamma and Anju signifies this complex affect. Despite betrayal, Leelamma performs acts of care towards Anju that defy normative expectations. Even before realising the truth, Leelamma treats Anju like a daughter – preventing her from doing chores before work and urging her to eat. These small but intimate gestures signify that she is not a stereotypically cruel mother-in-law but someone trying to care. Even after discovering that Anju’s baby is not her son Thomaskutty’s, Leelamma offers to bequeath her land to Anju and her baby. Although this may stem from her desperation to hold onto familial belonging, it is also a remarkably generous gesture.
What makes these acts powerful is not their purity but their emotional complexity. Leelamma’s care emerges in the midst of betrayal, making it all the more ethically compelling. When her daughter insults Anju, Leelamma unexpectedly comes to the defence of her daughter-in-law: ‘She was the one who stayed and cared for Thomaskutty when he was suffering. She has that place here’ (Ullozhukku, 2024: 1:38:08–1:38:11). This emotional intervention, although small, reveals Leelamma’s capacity to prioritise lived care over biological loyalty.
This transformation deepens when Leelamma overhears Anju’s anguished outburst about her loveless marriage and lost life. Despite being heartbroken for her son, rather than retaliating, Leelamma speaks to Anju’s father, asking him to let Anju go wherever she wants. In the end, she once again offers Anju her land and even suggests that Anju, Rajeev and the child live with her. Despite her knowing that Anju’s baby is not her son’s, Leelamma insists on giving the baby their first gold ornament – a gesture of radical inclusion.
Anju responds in kind to Leelamma. Although burdened and angry, she consistently takes care of Leelamma and Thomaskutty. In one powerful moment, Rajeev asks her to accept property that Leelamma has offered to her – a move that would solve all of their financial problems. Anju wavers because of her blind love towards Rajeev but ultimately refuses, realising the deep betrayal such an act would signify. Anju chooses not to exploit Leelamma’s vulnerability, even when she could. This reciprocity becomes even clearer in Anju’s final choice. When she refuses Rajeev’s desire to acquire Leelamma’s land, he slut-shames Anju, claiming he is superior for still accepting her after she has been with another man. Shocked, Anju does not return to her parents but decides to go and live with Leelamma. Although Anju’s options are limited, this is still a deliberate choice. She recognises Leelamma’s gestures and the unexpected emotional room Leelamma makes for her. Anju senses that Leelamma, despite all her flaws and past betrayals, has been the most understanding and has given her the most grace. In return, she offers her presence, perhaps out of care or perhaps out of a recognition of shared loneliness.
This is echoed by Leelamma’s sister, a nun who paves the way for Anju to discover the truth about Thomaskutty’s illness, and by Jiji, who believes she is helping her daughter by securing her a ‘well-off’ family. While these acts may be flawed or misdirected, they are part of a larger undercurrent of feminine solidarity – an affective network invisible to the men around them. In this web, Anju and Leelamma’s relationship becomes a microcosm of care and survival.
These gestures are not idealised acts of forgiveness, and they do not mean that betrayal is erased. They reflect what the ethics of care conceptualises as moral practices shaped by the lived tensions of dependence, conflict and need (Larrabee, 2016: 14). In Ullozhukku, while care operates within patriarchal expectations of feminine duty (Larrabee, 2016: 13), it cannot be reduced to mere obligation. What starts as socially conditioned responsibility gains its ethical weight only because it continues even after trust is brutally broken. Anju’s refusal of total self-sacrifice and Leelamma’s eventual partial alignment with Anju portray care as a difficult practice that involves anger, pride and restraint. Although care does not undo harm here, it still tries to soften further devastation. In Ullozhukku, betrayal and affection stick to the same gestures: a plea to a father to set his daughter free, land still offered after betrayal, the decision not to cheat a mother-in-law who has been good and caring and the decision to join the mother-in-law in the end. These acts become feminist refusals to abandon care. Although this feminism may not dismantle patriarchy or eliminate any hierarchies, in a structure that pits women against each other within male-centred conflicts, the characters’ refusal to fully embrace that antagonism subtly shifts the moral field here. The result is not triumphant solidarity. It is a quiet willingness to remain bound to one another without pretending that the wound has healed. Instead of clarity or closure, Ullozhukku offers affective entanglement. Love does not erase betrayal, and grief does not guarantee tenderness. However, in this murky, leaky house of women’s lives, care still seeps through not as salvation but as a stubborn presence.
The space as a medium for trauma and affect
The eruption of grief, betrayal and care in Ullozhukku stems from the spatial entrapment created by the flood. The house, flooding and isolated, becomes more than a setting. It becomes a pressure chamber. Its watery enclosure forces coexistence, halts rituals and suspends time. The funeral cannot proceed; escape is physically delayed; and affective intensities such as grief, guilt, resentment and care are forced to surface. Space here is not inert; it generates, intensifies and exposes long-submerged emotions. The floodwaters and the pouring rain that submerge the home make these emotional ruptures inevitable. As Sara Ahmed (2004: 4) argues, emotions ‘stick’ to bodies, histories and spaces. Through proximity and repetition, these emotions could circulate and intensify. Consequently, the flooded house becomes the site through which affect accumulates and, in a way, ‘floods’ them. The characters have no choice but to confront each other as the flooded house becomes a literal trap and a metaphorical suspension of a space where no progress is possible until the dead are acknowledged and the living are heard. The proximity enforced by the floods is both inconvenient and productive, breaking routines, dissolving hierarchies, paving the way for confrontation, revelation and unlikely solidarities. There is no funeral, escape or quick return to what is ‘normal’. In this captive space, care and trauma co-exist and the women are compelled to face, rely on and hurt each other before eventually extending gestures of care that might not have occurred otherwise. Betrayals are confessed not out of courage but because spatial enclosure forces emotional exposure. As Astrida Neimanis (2012: 87) notes in her hydrofeminist framework, water blurs boundaries between self and other and past and present. It seeps, holds and connects. It delays closure and demands relationality. The same water that halts Thomaskutty’s burial suspends grief, creating a kind of liquid temporality (Venugopal, 2024). Within this space, care is compelled. As movement is impossible, ethics must flow around what remains, which is grief, resentment and unprocessed trauma.
Michel Foucault’s (1986: 25) concept of heterotopia offers a theoretical explanation of this spatial force: heterotopias are real spaces that mirror, contest or invert normative ones, often appearing at moments of crisis or deviation. The house is cut off from society by water and becomes a heterotopia of crisis – a site of death, expected birth, trauma, breakdown and complex emotions. Anju’s pregnancy becomes a heterotopia of deviation. As a single pregnant woman who has violated the social and sexual codes of her family and community, Anju becomes what Foucault (1986: 25) calls a ‘deviant body’, marked by difference and contained within an exceptional space. Yet this very deviation produces new ethical possibilities. The flooded home becomes a crucible in which betrayal and affection boil together, shaping a care ethic that is forged through grief and necessity.
In everyday life, these women may have continued to orbit each other in silence or abandoned each other. However, here, the proximity and the pausing of time demand a response. Through its refusal to offer relief or escape and by trapping and transforming, the shared flooded space becomes a third character in the film. As the body of Thomaskutty decomposes in the house and as Anju’s unborn child grows inside her, the home becomes a space where death and life cohabit and where past grief and future hope must make room for each other. Water delays the burial and shapes the moral and emotional terrain. It enforces intimacy, amplifies affect and forces a feminist ethic that emerges from the sheer necessity of surviving together. As Doreen Massey (1994: 155) posits, space is never neutral but a product of relations. The strained, unresolved and complicated relations become the very conditions for a mild solidarity to emerge. It is only within this space that Leelamma can choose to view Anju as a co-sufferer instead of as a traitor. It is only here that Anju can begin to see Leelamma’s pain as grief instead of her manipulation. In this way, space – as the submerged, trapped and emotionally soaked space of the flooded home – is the very condition for the emotional, ethical and feminist shifts that the film makes possible.
Conclusion
Ullozhukku (2024) is a film that resists easy categorisation. Although this article does not engage in archival collage in the manner recommended by Lily Atkinson (2025: 58), it still resonates with her contention that feminisms become comprehensible through particular cuts and attachments – that is, acts of collage that shape what becomes visible. In this sense, by reading Ullozhukku through survival, trauma, care and spatial pressure, feminism is approached as assembled rather than linear and resists what Atkinson (2025: 72) calls ‘rigid frames of feminist intelligibility’. Rather than portraying feminist resistance through dramatic gestures or decisive ruptures, the film explores how everyday choices made by women, often under pressure, can still carry emotional and ethical weight. It highlights how these choices are shaped by circumstance, conditioning, history and relational entanglements. What emerges is not a narrative of victory or resolution but one of survival, negotiation and quiet endurance.
To begin with, the film complicates the notion of female agency. Anju’s choices, whether to withhold her pregnancy, speak the truth or eventually accompany Leelamma, are not acts of rebellion or submission in any straightforward sense. They are decisions made within a web of emotional fatigue, duty, longing and unresolved grief. They do not represent heroic or selfless choices but deeply human ones rooted in the realities of her life. Similarly, Leelamma’s behaviour shifts from control and bitterness to vulnerability and longing for connection. Her final plea to Anju is not a demand but an acknowledgement of shared pain. Both women, in different ways, demonstrate a degree of self-awareness that requires them to move far beyond their own trauma and desires. They move far enough to recognise how their actions affect each other, even if not always enough to act differently.
The emotional undercurrent of trauma in the film is subtle but persistent. Much of the grief is inherited or unspoken. Anju’s emotional exhaustion from a loveless marriage, Leelamma’s unresolved regrets and the spectral presence of Thomaskutty’s corpse all weigh heavily on the atmosphere, influencing how the characters relate to each other, making their acts of care or confrontation more complex. The trauma is not singular or visibly huge. It accumulates slowly and lingers, shaping how both women remember, react and endure.
These nuances make the film’s portrayal of care particularly significant. Care is not driven by complete selflessness. It emerges alongside resentment, blame and discomfort. Yet, despite all this, both women make space for each other. Anju’s decision to accompany Leelamma is neither fully rational nor emotional; it is a gesture that acknowledges a shared burden. The film does not portray this as an act of forgiveness or moral superiority but as a moment where two people, despite everything, continue to show up for each other. In doing so, it reveals a form of care that is flawed and conditional but deeply real.
Space plays a crucial role in shaping both trauma and affect in the film. The floodwaters serve as more than a backdrop, compressing time, suspending routine and trapping the characters into prolonged proximity. This forced closeness intensifies their interactions, making avoidance impossible and confrontation inevitable. Space becomes the very condition through which emotions are released and relationships renegotiated. Without the flood and the delay in burying Thomaskutty’s body, much of what is said and unsaid in the film might have remained concealed.
Ultimately, Ullozhukku destabilises the binaries of victim and agent, complicity and resistance, care and harm, offering a view of feminist ethics that emerges not from moral clarity but from emotional entanglement and survival. The women in the film navigate the emotionally charged, challenging spaces shaped by kinship, duty and circumstance. The film does not seek to resolve these tensions into neat moral outcomes. Instead, it suggests that feminism can be located, even if in unsettling ways, in the compromised, deeply felt realities of ordinary lives. In the quiet solidarity that takes shape between Anju and Leelamma, there is no perfect resolution. However, there is a recognition of each other’s pain. In that shared acknowledgement, Ullozhukku gestures towards another way of understanding care, resistance and feminist possibility – one that emerges from the everyday negotiations of women living in economically constrained and socially entangled South Asian contexts, whose lives cannot be effectively measured against dominant Western-orientated liberal-feminist ideals of autonomy or resistance. Although this article focuses on a single film and does not attempt to survey a broader corpus from this regional context or other regional contexts, it proposes a framework for reading survival-orientated feminism and affective ethics within cinematic narratives. This framework can be extended to examine similar themes in other regional cinemas, disaster narratives and domestic trauma films, thereby opening further avenues for South Asian feminist film scholarship. Ullozhukku as a film creates space for a socially and culturally grounded, affectively rich feminist ethic shaped by survival, interdependence and quiet acts of care – a feminism that is grey and one that unfolds in the contradictions of ordinary lives rather than in the clarity of ideological frameworks.
Footnotes
Unnimaya Remalakshmi’s contribution includes conceptualisation, ideation, theoretical engagement, drafting, editing and submission of this manuscript. Nayana George’s contribution includes conceptualisation, ideation, theoretical engagement and editing.
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.