Mystery does not always announce itself with thunder. Sometimes it arrives disguised as silence -an empty chair, a name spoken in past tense, a path on a map that ends abruptly. The best thrillers are built on these absences. They grow their tension from things half-said, half-seen, from a geography that refuses to surrender its secrets. The viewer, like an uninvited traveller, is drawn into a place where truth behaves like mist – real enough to touch, still always shifting out of reach. The thrill is not in the destination, but in the slow excavation of fear, memory, and the invisible laws that govern human lives. 

Into this atmosphere wanders South Indian Malayalam film Ekō, like a lone figure returning to a village after decades away, carrying stories that cannot be spoken in daylight. Dinjith Ayyathan directs it with the posture of someone approaching a forbidden door, and Bahul Ramesh—both writer and cinematographer—seems to write not with ink but with shadows. The film does not chase answers, rather it listens to its silences. Familiar signs of the genre appear (legends, disappearances, the fragile line between myth and truth) but each element is turned ever so slightly, made stranger, more unsettling.

Together, they take the well-worn skeleton of the mystery thriller and clothe it with a different skin, not glossy and loud, but pale, cold, and alive with whispers. What might have been a straightforward hunt becomes a meditation on power that hides behind protection, on stories that eclipse facts, and on the long, echoing footsteps of a man whose absence is more terrifying than his presence ever could be.

Instead of racing toward explanations, Ekō settles into its hills and silences. The screenplay moves like mist – drifting, returning, withholding – letting the audience feel the weight of lives dictated by control and the long shadow of a man (Kuriachan) whose absence is more powerful than his presence. With its careful pacing and atmospheric craft, the film positions itself not just as another mystery, but as a study of how ‘protection’ becomes ‘restriction,’ how loyalty becomes fear, and how power, once planted, grows in unexpected directions.

Even before the viewer realises it, the film has turned the forest, the solitary houses, and most of all the dogs, into instruments of knowledge – tools through which some characters watch, remember, and finally resist. The film is less interested in who Kuriachan is than in the long record of what he has done, what he has controlled, and what returns to confront him.

In world cinema, we have seen mysteries........

© Eurasia Review