Athiran 2019

In 1967, Lakshmi returns home to find her niece, Nithya, playing with a thread while the family lies dead, a scene that unsettles her and hints at a fragile grip on reality. Nithya’s unsettling reaction to her aunt makes Lakshmi worry that the girl might be the killer, a fear that will echo through the years.

Five years later, a remote, forest-surrounded asylum becomes the setting for a tense drama. Dr. Kannan Nair, a psychiatrist, arrives to inspect the place and meets five resident patients, Renuka the caretaker, and the clinic’s striking head, Dr. Benjamin Diaz. From the outset, Nair questions the ethics of the operation and Benjamin’s methods, while Benjamin tries to demonstrate his expertise—often through hypnosis or sly manipulations.

Although the records list five patients, Nair senses a sixth presence lurking in the shadows: Nithya, kept away in a hidden cell. Benjamin insists that Nithya is his daughter and that she must be restrained because she is dangerous, a claim Nair refuses to accept at face value.

Nair’s curiosity compels him to visit Nithya in her cell, where she appears both formidable and ghostly. She strikes when she senses an intruder, and Nair wakes hours later, shaken but determined. He records his findings and continues to explore the labyrinthine corridors, learning from Renuka that the asylum’s vast maze remains only partially charted.

A tunnel behind a door leads Nair to Lakshmi, who is locked in a separate cell and urges him to rescue Nithya. Returning to the doctor’s quarters, Nair chances upon a diary hidden beneath Benjamin’s desk, a discovery that begins to unravel Nithya’s past. The diary reveals a layered history: Nithya’s father is not Benjamin, but Jaya Narayana Varma, a Nadakkal Kovilakam royal who loved his daughter and trained her in kalari—a striking detail that frames Nithya not as a mere patient but as someone shaped by a storied lineage. In the midst of this, Nair’s own investigation is interrupted when a security guard saves him after he slips into a dockside area.

The next day, Nair chooses to place Nithya among the other patients, challenging Benjamin’s claim that autism equates to a confined, irredeemable condition. As Nair digs deeper into the diary and Nithya’s memories begin to surface, he confronts Benjamin, vowing to protect her and to uncover the truth behind her past. The two engage in a dangerous pursuit through the hospital’s corridors, and a violent confrontation ensues that leaves them both scarred, but ultimately successful in escaping.

As the suspense tightens, it’s revealed that the man claiming to be Dr. Kannan Nair is actually Vinayan, Vinayan the cousin and a patient with his own delusions. The real Dr. Nair has been elsewhere, and the hospital’s staff have failed to verify identities, a lapse that becomes central to the story’s crux. Through a series of flashbacks, the audience learns that Vinayan’s presence is the product of paranoid misperception, not a genuine stake in the medical history they’ve been told.

The narrative makes it clear that Vinayan was a dangerous sociopath who murdered several members of the family, while Nithya’s father, Varma, was killed by his own brothers in a bid to protect the young heir. The cousins’ bond, promised long before Varma’s death, binds Nithya and Vinayan in a planned, if unstable, alliance. The film closes with a resolve to bring Vinayan to justice, while a final image shows Vinayan and Nithya living together in a serene hillside home, free from the hospital’s shadow.

sheep don’t hunt, they are to be hunted.

In the end, the true Dr. Nair stands above the surrounding chaos, denouncing the unsafe practices of the asylum and vowing to pursue Vinayan wherever he hides, while the story reaffirms a fragile, uneasy peace for Nithya—now free to choose her own path with the man she loves, under a watchful, hopeful sky.