After the release of Masthishka Maranam – A Frankenbiting of Simon's Memories, I didn't feel a sense of arrival as much as a sense of release. For years, the film had lived inside my head as an impossible collection of ideas—memory, identity, technology, politics, humour and grief—all fighting for space in the same frame. Once it was finally out in the world, it no longer belonged only to me.
The response in Kerala reassured me that audiences were willing to engage with a cognitively dense film that refused to simplify itself. When Netflix acquired the film and it reached a wider audience, it felt less like validation and more like the completion of a long journey. The anxiety of whether people would "get it" slowly gave way to curiosity about the conversations it would start.
Looking back, what stayed with me most wasn't reviews or numbers but gratitude. Every performance, every technical decision, every difficult discussion had become invisible inside the finished film—the way cinema should work. Watching the ensemble of actors (Rajisha Vijayan, Niranj ManianPillai Raju, Jagadeesh, Divyaprabha, Ann Saleem, Rahul Rajagopal, Midhun Venugopal, Vishnu Agasthya and many others bring emotional weight to a world built on fractured memories reminded me that even the most conceptual stories survive only because actors make them human. The contributions of the cinematography, editing, production design, sound, VFX, music and colour grading were no longer individual departments; they had dissolved into a single cinematic experience.
The release also taught me something uncomfortable. Every film leaves behind a version of the filmmaker who made it. The person who started writing Masthishka Maranam was no longer the person watching audiences respond to it. There was pride, certainly, but also exhaustion, relief and an unexpected emptiness. Once the film was released, the obsession that had occupied my mind for so long disappeared overnight, leaving behind only silence—and the excitement of searching for the next impossible story.
