Unto the Dusk

Background

Wishing to try a "novel approach" to visual communication, Sajin Baabu wrote the script with no background score and with characters being un-named, and in December 2010, while he was with a team at the Kairali Theatre in Thiruvananthapuram to shoot a documentary of one of the IFFK delegates, he met writer and artist M.P. Sheeja. After he showed her his script for Unto the Dusk, she agreed to produce it with her associate L. Geetha. In December 2013, the film was reported and being near completion with an expected release date for some time in early 2014. Most of the film's cast are "first-timers".

Plot

The film opens with a scene of death of a young choir singer in a seminary with evidence pointing towards necrophilia. The police suspects and tortures two seminary students. What follows is a nonlinear, fragmented, cinematic collection of images that travel back and forth in time, in fine detail at times and just a suggestive glance at other times, thus assisting and obfuscating the viewer in this engagement with the film.

Parental compulsion earlier forces the protagonist - one of the two suspects - to the seminary. In the seminary, while in the pursuit of the path of St. Francis of Assisi, the anxiety, challenges, conflict and the torment that accompany the process of growing up into an adult, transforms him into a vengeful man. He leaves the seminary and starts on a journey of self-discovery in which he travels far and wide, most often into the deep jungles. Spirituality, retribution and unexpected encounters with nature form the philosophical backdrop of the film.

We find the protagonist in physical intimacy with his co-accused seminary student in the past and with a co-traveller on a one night stand by payment while on his current travels. We find the tormented co-accused jumping off a cliff into the sea, committing suicide, within the range of his sight. And the co-traveller now tells him her motive is to use the money she collected thus, as dowry to wed her lover.

We find his co-accused and him cleaning the dead body of the senior priest - we had earlier been shown that he was interested in the lady choir singer and the senior priest walks by them clearing his throat and later tries to talk him out of the interest telling that lust is just mind trying to reach out to heights and not to follow it. As he listens to this advice we find him clearing the cemetery with the energy of one who is unable to bear the weakness of the flesh and mentions the same to the priest. Later when police first asks him why he was always at the cemetery and he answers that he used to keep the area clean. Then the senior priest requested the police for conversation in private, the police asks them to leave, and from the window as he's leaving, we find him overhearing the priest talking to the policemen. We have our own doubt what the priest would have told the policemen and if the priests death was not natural after all. Coming back to present times, we see the protagonist reading the newspaper where the real culprits of necrophilia have been caught by the police - this is when the viewer becomes assured of his innocence in the crime.

We find him as an adolescent who encounters adulteries real or imagined in his own home. We discover his discomfort with his father's intentions and relation with his sister. He finds his mother having physical relation with another man - they discover him watching from terrace. Later we find that she has hanged herself one day when he returns from school.

We find him now buying a gun and then starting on his travel far and wide among hills and jungles in search of something. He mentions it to one of men he met in his journey who was sculpting 'Jesus in his eighties at Kashmir' and asking them why he wanted to skill, that he needs to put an end to things that goes against nature. We find many motifs with central theme of unnatural love in his path. We find in the eyes of one of the men who passes by enquiring about who he was, the low esteem people have about someone - looks like his father.

Towards the end he discovers his father and sister living in a small hut in the remote hills where he stalks his father while they are harvesting honey but finds him come face to face. His father acknowledges the trouble he took to track them down, offering a fruit to him asking him to get fresh in the stream in the valley and eat the fruit. Later in the hut at night, his father tells him that all relationships are complicated and are pure only if viewed without any judgemental attitude. Later in the day he again approaches them to kill them and after his mind imagines a changed unnatural relation with his sister when he sees her from far bathing in a lake, he is tormented and digs his palms into the thorns and later throws the knife into the lake in front of his father eyes. We find the father looking after the receding form of his son with a hint of amusement in his eyes.

We find the protagonist running away from it all, downhill, stumbling & tumbling over & getting hurt & rolling down.

Awards and nominations

Unto the dusk was first premiered in Mumbai International Film Festival in 2014 in India Gold category followed by Bengaluru International Film festival 2014 where it won Chitrbharathi award for Best Indian Film. The film was one of the movies that was selected for the International Film competition section in International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) 2014 winning Rajathachakoram and the Certificate of Merit for Promotion.

The movie also won the director, Sajin Baabu, the Best-Debut Director Award at Kerala Film Critic's Association 2014.