'Mukundan Unni' and his malice without closure

In ‘Mukundan Unni Associates’, the protagonist is never held accountable for his evil actions. He is a rare anti-hero in Indian cinema, writes R Krishnakumar

Two weeks since the OTT release of Abhinav Sunder Nayak’s Mukundan Unni Associates (MUA), many reviews and social media short takes — including the generally favourable ones — remain polarised on this mainstream Malayalam film’s unusually shady moral universe.

MUA has at its centre a Saul Goodman-like self-starter, a lawyer who hustles his way through to claim what he sees as his fair share of the good life. Mukundan Unni (Vineeth Sreenivasan), though, does not come with Goodman’s glibness; he plays it stealthy, stony-faced, almost passive. Unni does not state motives to the people around him, or even hint at the extent to which he could go trying. He is cold to warmth and cannot be distracted from his choices by the abstractions of relationships.

We know all this from Unni’s voice-over which contains pithy, yet revelatory pointers to a man who is evil and knows it. “There are two kinds of people in this world. The exploiters and the exploited. I have decided to be among the first,” he says. This is not the familiar, wronged antagonist with a backstory, or a reason that traces the arc of his moral depravity. There is no reference to any serious personal setback that may have pushed him to decide to be the exploiter. There is no crossover moment. There is no karma catching up either.

Unni’s choices strike you as default, by design. There is no contemplation before the act, there is no remorse after. We watch him enter deals with the ambulance drivers, accident victims and hospital staff as together, they scam insurance companies. These segments play like the black comedy the film promised to be in its teasers. Then, we see things get darker. There is death in slow-motion, there is a man who watches it with wide-eyed admiration, there is a whole set of people in openly transactional relationships. This is a story built on greed, the individual’s drive to get ahead, with no attempt to censure or rationalise it.

The anti-hero space Unni inhabits is not all too unfamiliar. He is the kind of man that makes you go easy on the expectations you have from a conventional lead character — to be ethical, morally grounded — because such compulsions could come in the way of appreciating what is essentially a good, engaging story. By following movie characters in morally undefined spaces, and empathising with them, we could be stopping by our own darker corners but we have also needed these men and women to stop at some point, to face retribution. Their hour of reckoning could also be ours; this is when we slap ourselves out of the character internalisation and reconfirm that we cannot, always, get away being bad.

Abbas-Mustan’s Baazigar (1993) had Shah Rukh Khan break new ground as a hero who could fake love and kill. In Kannada cinema, Upendra has had rewarding anti-hero experiments in films including A (1998) and Upendra (1999). Unni does have a soul-brother in Mohanlal’s Jayarajan from Uyarangalil (1984), a man whose ambition propels him to heights from where his eventual fall looks inevitable, and justified. All of them get fixed at the end — either by violent death or through plot points that lead to a character transformation. Venkat Prabhu’s Mankatha (2011), where Ajith Kumar’s ice-cool crook remains unapologetic all through, has arguably been the only mainstream Indian film that lets the flawed hero escape a moral scrutiny.

That, really, is the thing with MUA. It defies an important tradition of our popular cinema — its need to define cause and effect on moralistic terms, its linear tracking of character choices and consequences. Unni, bad Unni, gets away with what he does.

Vineeth is a smart casting choice; the actor who has played an assortment of good-boy variants brings in that added shade to Unni. Nayak, in one of his interviews, talks about his intention to question the formulaic. So, is this more a calculated shot at redrawing our film heroes than a study of human behaviour? It could be both but ‘MUA’ strikes you more as a darkly comical take on things as they are.

Unni is not an outlier in a world that also facilitates him. By not being judgmental about their motives and methods, the film does slip on to rough ground and exposes itself to the questions about purpose, bad role models and setting examples. MUA is a bold disruption that, however, could also inspire lesser films to push a bad-hero trope to problematic glorification.

A mother, narrating her trouble explaining to her 12-year-old son why Unni is not held accountable till the end, told me that the boy eventually found his own answer — “Maybe, the story is not over.” A sequel? The prospect is comforting. The prospect is terrifying.