Isolated Inside and Outside: A Study of Malayalam Film Bhoothakalam as a COVID Film

The COVID-19 pandemic led to nationwide lockdowns, placing citizens under enforced isolation and quarantine. During successive waves of the outbreak, economic and esthetic production activities were undertaken in dispersed ways, with films increasingly shot and released on Over-the-Top (OTT) streaming platforms. At this crucial juncture, Malayalam cinema emerged as a significant site of pandemic cultural production, with numerous films produced and distributed digitally. Bhoothakalam (Past, Rahul Sadasivan, 2022), released on SonyLiv, narrates the story of generational trauma and the fraught relationship between a mother and son in self-isolation. This paper reads the film as a psychological narrative of isolation both within and beyond the mise-en-scène, situated in the socio-political context of its pandemic-era release. Drawing on Freud's framework of isolation as a defense mechanism, the compulsion to repeat, and the uncanny (Unheimlich), alongside Derrida's hauntology, the study examines the complexities of psychological trauma experienced by the mother and son and the spectral presence haunting their quarantined domestic space. The paper further argues that the pandemic's enforced physical isolation did not produce the characters' psychic defenses but stripped away the social buffers that had kept those defenses liveable. The analysis proposes that Bhoothakalam, distributed via OTT to isolated viewers during lockdown, functions not merely as a representation of catharsis but as a mechanism of it.