Official Trailer:

Lijo Jose Pellissery (LJP) has an exceptional talent of visualizing the abstract. He never spoon-feeds the audience. LJP doesn’t take the effort to explain. He leaves it to the audience. It is the cinematic equivalent of a painting – whoever looks at it can interpret however they choose to.  His movies may come across as absurd and abstract, but they provoke you like a painting. Churuli is like Jallikattu but ratchets up the fantasy few levels higher. A surreal and allegorical psychological drama.

Churuli kicks off with a mythical story about a brahmin who is misled into a never-ending spiral by Perumadan. This short synopsis gives us a hint what we are being led in to. Two cops go undercover posing as laborers to smoke out an escaped prisoner from a remote village named Churuli. Movie starts as an investigative thriller, I tried to follow the story up to a certain point and then gave up. I went with the flow. The moment the jeep crossed the bridge, absurdity begins. People behave differently. They are unfriendly. There are no inhibitions. Profanities fly. There is complete lawlessness. There are aliens (they looked like aliens with lights gear on the head), shape shifting trees, time machine, celestial bodies flying across the sky, old lady chasing with an axe, an arrack shop doubles as a church for christening ceremony. You get the picture, anything goes. Dazed and confused, just when I started wondering where this all are leading to, climax leaves you with what the hell just happened feel. Connecting back to the initial synopsis, the climax fits, LJP has taken us for a spiral ride. There is no beginning and there is no end. The final imagery came across like the psychedelic final images of 2001 Space Odyssey climax and Jallikattu’s human pyramid.

Churuli is backed by stunning cinematography, sound design, and brilliant performances. With no closure and abstract, movie does leave the audience in a confused state. But it does force us to think. As humans, are we so bleak that we will fall in to a crass, and crude self if there are no inhibitions and lawlessness as the movie shows?