Kabir once said, “Reliving your traumas is the hardest part of being a policeman.” That single line contains his entire cinema. No one trains you for what the job exposes you to: the sight of a decomposed body, the stench that follows you home, the way death seeps into appetite and sleep. In Joseph (2018), the protagonist played by Joju, confronts the corpse of his former love — and with it, the futility of professional detachment. The scene is not about death alone but about intimacy violated by duty, something which Kabir has confessed.
The Pattern of Titles
Interestingly, Kabir’s titles trace his journey. One must be careful, of course, not to read too much into this pattern — titles often arise through collaboration or chance. Yet, even if not consciously planned, the sequence reveals an emotional logic, an accidental autobiography of vision.
Joseph (2018) is personal, almost biblical (Genesis 50 “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives") — a single, consummate individual whose inner life eclipses even a grand social evil like organ trade. His sacrifice feels less heroic than familial, the tragedy of a man undone by love more than corruption.
Nayattu (“The Hunt,” 2021) expands the focus outward — from the man to the chase. The narrative stretches to accommodate the political and social complexity.
Ela Veezha Poonchira (“The Valley Where Leaves Fall,” 2022) contracts the world again — to a specific, isolating landscape. The place becomes the policeman’s mirror, shaping his descent. Soubin Shahir’s officer, betrayed by wife and colleague, channels hurt into vengeance. The outpost becomes both womb and tomb — proof that the place, when deprived of witness, can deform the mind. Interviews suggest he sought to “let the silence accumulate until it becomes unbearable.”
Then Ronth (“The Patrol,” 2025): the most stripped-down of all. The title signals Kabir’s arrival at the ordinary — the repetitive act that defines a policeman’s life. No myth, no metaphor, just the common patrol. Yet inside that routine, the jeep becomes both confessional and courtroom, a moving debate between the novice and the veteran.
The many Shahis behind the Uniform
In Joseph, Joju George’s protagonist is Kabir’s first reflection — sharp, sorrowful, still clinging to ideals.
By Nayattu, the self divides: Joju the fatalist, Kunchacko Boban the doubter, Nimisha Sajayan the moral survivor. The rage of Joseph turns to lament.
In Poonchira, the fracture widens — Soubin’s officer crosses from discipline to abnormality. Betrayal and isolation corrode him into cruelty. It’s Kabir’s darkest point — the moment when duty mutates into vengeance.
And in Ronth, Dileesh Pothan’s Yohannan and Roshan Mathew’s recruit embody not reconciliation but recurrence — the same moral fatigue reappearing in younger skin. The disciple’s death leaves the teacher staring at the future he cannot change. Yohannan may survive, but he survives as witness, foreseeing the next suicide (in police force), the next silence. What remains is not closure but the weary knowledge that the system renews its own despair
Across these films runs Kabir’s first preoccupation: the moral anatomy of the officer himself. That anatomy, though, is never entirely his alone. Each director who shaped his scripts — from Padmakumar’s melancholic realism to Prakkat’s taut social gaze — left distinct incisions.
The System and Its Shadows
Parallel to these men, runs the institution that shapes them. The institution is not merely a metaphor for moral corrosion; it also registers Kerala’s social hierarchies. Beneath every procedural surface, pulsating questions of class, caste, and visibility emerge — forces that Nayattu makes painfully explicit.
“How can forty thousand policemen control three and a half crores?” “Police has been constituted to protect the have from the have-nots.” Exchanges in Ronth are Kabir’s purest statements — the system, reduced to its unsentimental logic and purpose.
Even his commercial detour, Officer on Duty, betrays the same instinct — a flawed officer and a compromised system, and beneath both, empathy.
Ronth: Minimalism as Mastery
If Joseph was confession and Nayattu confrontation, Ronth is transmission — the passing of knowledge. Amidst Yohannan’s outbursts, CPO Dinnath learns by seeing what no academy prepares one for — a haunted house, a hanging woman, a suicide — the fatigue that enters the bones. Kabir adopts a teacher–pupil form — a modern day Socratic method, grounded not in abstraction but in lived experience. Yet even here, teaching feels less like enlightenment than endurance.
Kabir has chiselled away every trace of excess. Ronth breathes through headlights, pauses, and low voices. At times, this restraint edges toward severity — a purity that risks emotional coldness. Yet that very austerity is also Kabir’s moral style: the refusal to console either character or viewer. There is no melodrama, no score to soften reality. It is a film of minimal means and maximal truth — art reduced to necessity.
We are used to the shock and revulsion evoked by the system's rot, in other people's work say Narivetta or Thudarum, but not quite the numbness that Kabir leaves you with.
The Unending Patrol
Across these four titles runs a single movement: from the individual to the system, from confession to instruction. Joseph was pain, Nayattu was fear, Poonchira was madness, Ronth is recognition — a bleak clarity rather than understanding. Perhaps it is not understanding at all, but endurance — the stillness of one who has seen too much and must go on.
Where can Kabir go next? Perhaps his next step lies beyond the uniform — toward the unguarded civilian heart where duty finally dissolves into compassion. Because unlike most professions, policing cannot be left at the workplace. The lawless moments it absorbs follow the officer home — into family, appetite, and sleep.
And that is what Shahi Kabir’s body of work essentially reveal: an arc from the man to the act, to the place, and finally to the process itself. His works stand as a manual for endurance, and a reminder that the hardest part of duty is not what it demands, but what it refuses to let you forget.
It is not justice that breaks a policeman, but the silence he must carry after it. But how many, really can...
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