Look at that, I’ve now seen almost all Lilo Jose Pellissery’s movies! And it’s not easy, they take a lot out of you, these films.

What makes Pellissery such an amazing director is that, in every film, his style changes completely. And in every film, his style is difficult and unique. How could one director make the magical realism world of Amen, the complex hyperlink time shifting film City of God, and the neorealistic Angamaly Diaries? It’s the kind of intense difficult style that usually takes a career to develop, that you would expect to become a directors calling card, not something that was created for one film, and then never used again.

The key, I realized after watching two or three of his movies, is that the style follows the meaning. Most films come up with a theme and build it into the narrative, family or loneliness or greed or something like that. Pellissery comes up with a theme and builds it into his style, and then drags the narrative along behind it. City of God, the theme is the random connections and missed connections of city life. And so the style is chopped up, the same moment scene from multiple perspectives, a whole group of people who almost but not quite connect with each other, and the overall lesson that making a connection is the most important thing of all. This time around, I focused on the style, tried to start there and figure out what the film was saying.

At first the style seemed bland, it could have been made by any Malayalam director. Natural lighting and sets, digital cameras, and so on. But as I kept watching, especially thinking about the opening sequences, I figured out what the style is. It is man, as an animal. The camera never gives us a full close up of their faces showing a higher intelligence, even the dialogue is blurred and hard to follow (the subtitles are terrible but that’s something different), but mostly it is the distance. The way the camera is angled, to show the full bodies, moving as a unit, it feels like a nature film. Like we are supposed to be at a distance, observing the odd behavior of this strange beast.

And yet there is emotion there as well. This isn’t a boring documentary about what happens when everything goes right. This is an exciting documentary, about what happens when an enemy attacks an ant colony or a wolf pack migrates to new hunting ground. We feel the raw animal emotions here, anger and lust and hate and a kind of overwhelming drive towards passion and away from thought. But we, the audience, retreat from the idea of being the same as these characters, they are animals, we are something else.

It is that same-but-not-the-same feeling that Pellissery is trying to convey. Man is a beast, at heart. But we shouldn’t be beasts, we should overcome that, we should think and feel and plan, not just move forward as an unthinking mass. We shouldn’t merely hide our beastliness under a facade of routine (as is shown in the opening sequence), we should try to overcome it. Or, alternatively, we should have a constant inner battle against it rather than simply ignoring it until it bursts forth.

There is no one “good” in this movie, there is no hero. Antony Varghese and Chemban Vinod Jose have slightly more screentime than anyone else, but they are not heroes. It’s a dark world we are seeing, in which all men are beasts. But I don’t think Pellissery believes that. I think he wants to show us a world in which that is the reality, in which no one is able to maintain thought and control. But he is challenging us, the audience, to be better than that. To realize that there can be more to life than the base needs of food, sex, and survival.

There are a lot of themes in this film. Meat and the relationship of man to animal. The superficiality of all forms of order in society gone mad, from religion to government. Agriculture versus nature. Man versus woman as well, there is a clear divide of the base urges shown in the male versus female animal. It is man, not woman, that is the threat in this moment. But the overwhelming meaning is simply that man has the ability to be driven by base urges, in fact man welcomes the opportunity to be driven in such a way, makes a conscious choice to let go of reason for the joy of madness.

It is that joy in it all that Pellissery wants us to see, and feel, and yet be horrified at it. He wants us to out into the world aware of that urge, that joy, and afraid of it at the same time. To know that our fear and madness, the fear that we leap into at the slightest excuse, is the real danger. The thing we fear, whatever it is, is merely an excuse to let loose the danger of ourselves.