What a brilliantly disturbing movie. If you are a film person, someone who admires camerawork and inventive images and so on, you can watch it. If you are someone who tends to get emotionally involved in a film, maybe stay away, there are some very disturbing emotions here.

Whole plot in one paragraph:

Chemban Vinod Jose is the local butcher of a rapidly growing town. His assistant is Antony Verghase. Their meat is in high demand, everywhere. Chemban has a sister Santhy Balachandran, Antony tries to attract her and she laughs at him. And then early one morning they receive delivery of a bull to be butchered, the largest amount to be used for a wedding party locally. But they slip, and they bull escapes. It immediately knocks into a fire and sets a building alight. The next day, it is discovered that the bull has knocked over the milk at a dairy. The town is in an uproar, Antony and Chemban are blamed for everything. A gang forms and spends the whole day hunting the bull, the bull damages the local agriculture fields, and rampages through the local bank. The police are called but say they cannot do anything, they have to write a letter and wait for a response and have the proper department hunt the bull. The villagers take it into their own hands, send out trucks with speakers to warn woman and children to stay inside, no one to go to work. A gang of outsiders visiting town get drunk and join the hunt, with constant friction between them and the locals. Finally, Sabumon Abdusamad is called in, a former local who has a gun and a lot of attitude. It is revealed that he is the former lover of Chemban’s sister Santhy, Antony arranged for him to be arrested for growing and selling marijuana in order to get rid of him. Antony is determined to find the bull before Sabumon. He chases it in the jungle, and it falls into a well. Antony decides he wants to bring it out, not just kill it there. He rushes home to Santhy to brag, and grabs her and kisses her. There is now a massive mob of men, Antony organizes them into a team to build a pulley and raise the bull out of the well. They succeed, but in the mud and the dark, they slip and the bull frees itself. The mob runs away, and Antony’s old friend is killed in the stampede. The next day folks are even more determined to catch the bull. Antony and Sabumon track it down, fight over it, and then start fighting each other, Antony kills Sabumon and blames the bull. The whole massive mob of men move through the night looking for the bull and spot it. They chase it, Antony determined to be at the head. He finds the bull, and kills it. But then the another few men appear and leap on top of him. More and more men appear, climbing on top of each other, an enormous pile of struggling muddy men, with Antony suffocating at the bottom.

So, that’s the plot. A bull gets loose, and the world goes mad. There’s other things that happen that I skipped over, the police come back and try to calm the people, and the mob sets their police jeep on fire. We see one of the “respectable” folks on the bull hunt abusing his wife early in the film. And we have a glimpse of the women of the village calmly going about their business and laughing a bit at the “hunters”.

The point of the film isn’t the bull. The point is that it ISN’T the bull. The danger that destroys this village, it is the reaction to the bull. If the problem had simple been ignored, it would not have even been a problem.

The film is brilliant in how it shows that without showing it. The things the bull does that first night, we the audience never actually see them. We don’t even see the moment it escapes, just hear a cry of surprise from within the killing tent. The bull might have done nothing, Antony might simply have slipped. We see the bull run through an open flame, and then a large fire burning. Did the bull start the fire, or was it a series of accidents partly caused by the reaction to this small problem? Even the knocked over milk jugs, was that the bull or people running towards or away from the fire? It is not clear, purposefully not clear. The later parts, those we do see. The bull wanders into town, and is confused by the people yelling, blunders into a building, and then out again. The men fail, over and over, to capture him in the easiest of circumstances, even as simple as closing a gate fails them. Two men die, because of men. The confusion and disorganization and lack of planning leads to the stampede in the mud that kills one man and injures others. Antony kills another man and blames it on the bull. Even destruction of the fields is clearly caused by the men walking through them, not the animal himself. It is left to dawn on us slowly that the actual danger of the bull is not just exaggerated, but in fact only exists because of the fear of it. The mobs of men are confusing and inciting the bull into damage and violence it would not otherwise cause. And, eventually, the mob itself becomes direct danger.

This is a film that tries to capture a very particular feeling. Life is boring, life is routine. When something seems to call us to direct action, it is intoxicating. We leap forward to engage with something that feels out of the norm, that makes us feel alive again. And as others leap forward with us, our feelings feed off of each other. We are addicted to the rush, to feeling powerful and special somehow. And eventually the actual goal disappears, and instead we are merely piling on to each other, the chase itself is the goal.

There is a recurring image in the film, in the dark lights appearing over the horizon line and pushing forward. More and more lights gathering and coming faster and faster towards the camera and the center of the screen. They don’t seem like people at first, just lights. But then they become clearer as they come closer, and we see mad angry faces, dozens of crazed men running. It’s horribly disturbing, this realization that those lights aren’t just a pretty floating thing in the darkness, but represent dozens of individuals. And then that those individuals are so angry and hateful.

I was watching the film and I realized this is a familiar feeling to me. This is why I can’t go on social media. That sea of tweets, of facebook posts, of all the rest, to me they look like a sea of twinkling lights for just a moment, and then the individual faces flash into reality, and I am drowning under this angry mass stampeding mindlessly one way or the other. I know that isn’t everybody, I know there are those small sane groups like the women we see here calmly continuing to do their jobs, but the mob feels so large and loud and dangerous to me, that I can’t simply ignore it.

The worst part is, so often the mob is running after one of those pointless bulls. What is the point of a twitter campaign, or a million Facebook shares, or whatever it is you do on instagram, if the actual real world thing at the heart of it does not exist? If it is about an unconfirmed rumor that will be officially denied and scrapped if we all just do nothing and wait a day? The point is the chase, the excitement, that feeling of being all powerful and part of something larger. The purposeful delusion that you are needed, that your one small voice will make a difference.

It’s mob insanity. And it comes in so many different ways and so many different places. I do not believe it is inevitable, I do not believe it is humanity’s natural state. And I do not believe that Pellissery believes that either, I have seen too many of his films to believe that, too many times he told stories of humanity turning to beauty, love, truth, and justice. In this particular case, he wanted to show us a world gone mad in order to force us to feel it, to recognize it, and to turn in horror from it when we find it within ourselves.

In this film, there are times and there are people who could have turned this aside, redirected it. The local police is distracted by fighting with his wife, he does not step forward and force the laws of society onto this situation. The church is distracted as well, greedy for its own meat instead of thinking of the needs of others. The people who should be most sane and experienced, Antony and Chemban, are distracted by their own issues, while simultaneously disrespected by the rest of society. As butchers, they are seen as lowly, not as good. Instead of being approached as responsible important parties who should be in charge, they are blamed and dismissed. And instead of stepping forward and taking charge and taking responsibility, Antony and Chemban are torn up with their own issues. Mob runs wild not because they cannot be stopped, but because those who should stop them do nothing.

That is what I must believe the film is telling us. Not that man is an animal incapable of thought, but that man is capable of choosing whether not to think. It is a warning and a lesson to the viewer, do not give in. Do not enjoy the thrill of the chase, the power of the animal instinct. Cling to your sanity, your reason, or you will end up smothered and trapped in the midst of a horde.