Ela Veezha Poonchira 2022

Madhu, Soubin Shahir is a Poonchira hilltop cop returning to duty at a station that sits high above the land, where lightning is a frequent and dangerous visitor. The patrols there are as much about keeping visitors away as enforcing order, and Madhu learns that Venkhayam, the officer already stationed there, is slated to leave the very next day while Sudhy, another young policeman, is due to join. The fragile routine of the hill is about to be tested from several directions.

A mother and her two sons arrive at the outpost, the former carrying a memory of a late husband who once served as a constable on the same hill. She has long hoped to visit this place at least once more, a dream she shares with the others as they circle the station. One of the sons forgets something in the car and heads back down the hill. Sensing danger from an imminent storm, Madhu orders the trio inside the station for safety. The storm comes, and when it subsides, the mother calls out for her second son. They find him dead, killed by a direct strike of lightning just a few meters away. The grim discovery shatters the calm, and emergency teams move in to recover the body and restore order, leaving Madhu visibly shaken by what occurred on his watch.

Sudhi, the new arrival, is shown to be the opposite of the seasoned and brooding Madhu—playful, nosy, and eager to poke into others’ lives. He drinks and flirts, even as the team grapples with ongoing disturbances in the district: missing body parts, rapid radio updates, and a rising tension among the highest-ranking official who runs the station with a sharp temper. The Jeep Driver explains a personal betrayal—his wife left with another man—adding a human layer to the investigation as the team wheels through new alerts and discoveries.

A strange moment occurs when Sudhi notices the dogs near the station digging around the soil. He uncovers a buried hand, which Madhu calmly covers with his gun and then deliberately lets Sudhi escape the moment. Sudhi is terrified of what Madhu might do, and he begins plotting a way to report Madhu without provoking a confrontation. When a new team returns to the hilltop to push the inquiry further, Sudhi is tied up and gagged in the bushes, a staged moment that lets the investigators leave without exposing the tension between the two men. Madhu, however, frees him only to chase him through the rough terrain until they’re finally brought together for a tense, late-night conversation over a meal.

Over chicken biryani, Madhu reveals a chilling truth: the hand belonged to his wife Amrutha’s corpse, though he insists he did not kill her. Their marriage had been unhappy, with doctors labeling his erectile dysfunction as a “honeymoon depression” that persisted despite counseling. Madhu had refused to believe his wife was unfaithful, and when she finally died—hung herself—her suicide note claimed she was pregnant and overwhelmed by guilt over an affair she could not end. Madhu’s grief turns into a chilling act when he dismembers her body and stores the parts in a freezer.

As Sudhi eats, he asks about the man in the affair. Madhu reveals that he fed him what he had given life to and casts a cold glance at the biryani, a signal of the irreparable distance between the two men. Sudhi’s shock deepens when call records reveal Amrutha’s pregnancy and show that Sudhi was the man she was having an affair with, and who was expected to marry elsewhere. The revelation tightens the noose around Sudhi, who becomes a suspect in the broader tragedy, even as the police begin to understand the motive that shaped Madhu’s actions.

The climax arrives when Madhu ties Sudhi to a metal fence, a symbolic trap that leads to Sudhi’s death by lightning. The authorities arrive and are told that Sudhi died of a strike, but a torn piece of Madhu’s shirt caught on the fence unsettles the highest official, who has endured a similar heartbreak with his own wife. This shared past gives him a quiet, grim certainty: Madhu’s motive, rooted in a painful personal history, may explain the tragedy without providing a clean explanation for all the bloodshed. The investigation ends with the official deciding to let Madhu go, reporting that Sudhi’s death was just another lightning strike and leaving the larger questions unspoken.