Aarkkariyam 2021

Set against the COVID lockdown of 2020, this Ittyavira is a quiet, ominous drama about a retired math teacher living alone in Palai, Kottayam, whose routine life is upended by the people closest to him. Shirley, his only child, arrives with her husband, Roy, a businessman facing serious financial troubles, and the visit stirs old anxieties about money, health, and the future. Shirley’s world has shrunk to a small circle—her husband, her child, and a distance from the father who home-schools her memories with both affection and unspoken burden.

As the couple spends time in Pala, Itty is frank about a plan to sell the sprawling family estate. The sale would be generous enough to steady Roy’s finances and still leave something for Itty to live a simpler life in an apartment as age and illness close in. But before any deal can close, Itty drops a darkest bomb: he wants to exhume the skeleton of a man he killed and buried on the property. The reason is pragmatic and chilling—the new owner might uncover the bones, and Itty wants to confront the past before it unravels him further. The revelation hits Roy with a mix of shock and moral alarm, but it is a moment that quietly redefines loyalties and duty.

The dead man is Augustine, Augustine, Shirley’s first husband who vanished for months and who returned home on the eve of a hospital birth. He was amused by the news of Shirley’s pregnancy and the baby that followed, a detail that haunts Itty as he explains to Roy the circumstances of the crime. Crucially, he keeps Shirley in the dark, trusting that some things are sealed by fate or God’s will rather than by truth alone. The crime itself never comes to light openly because Augustine had a pattern of disappearances, and the world around Shirley accepts a version of events that never fully resolves.

Overcome with a mix of guilt, fear, and pressure to keep the family intact, Roy wrestles with the possibility of becoming an accomplice. Yet he cannot avoid the moral weight of it, and in a tense turning point, he helps Itty dig up the bones and, eventually, burn them. The act is both a grim attempt at closure and a public confession that cannot erase the years of silence, but it does alter the dynamics of their family in a lasting way. After this, Itty relocates to his new apartment, and the years begin to show their toll—dementia creeping into his days and distorting memory as he moves through a life he can no longer fully recall.

In the final moments, Shirley speaks with a quiet, ache-filled candor about how the public gaze and private pity shadowed her as a young, dependent mother. She seeks a real end to a chapter that refused to close, admitting that she never identified the body herself. Roy carries the weight of the hidden truth—the knowledge of what happened and the burden of keeping it secret—like a cross that follows him to his grave. The film closes on a restrained, sorrowful note, where memory, guilt, and the cost of telling the truth collide in a small Kerala home, leaving a shell of a family to reckon with what remains unsaid.