Indian actor Parvathy Thiruvothu has spent two decades fighting the system from outside it – both on screen and off.
In “Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar” (“Prima Facie Guilty”), the Shahad Nilambur-directed thriller now running in theaters, she’s finally on the inside, portraying a police officer for the first time in a Malayalam film. But the actor still feels she’s living under constant judgment after speaking out against misogyny in Malayalam cinema nearly a decade ago.
“I loved it,” Thiruvothu says of playing a character embedded inside a state institution for once. “I’ll tell you why, because most of the time people don’t understand what it is like to stay within a rotten structure and try to change it.”
Thiruvothu, whose credits include “Bangalore Days,” “Take Off,” “Uyare” and “Virus,” has built a two-decade career largely on roles that push against the structures around her characters.
In “Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar,” produced by Arjun Selva under 11 Icons Film Productions, Thiruvothu plays Aleena Abraham, a woman who becomes a police officer through a compassionate appointment after the death of her husband, also a constable. Set largely inside a local police station, the film follows Aleena alongside fellow officers Divya, Dasan and Sreenath as an unexpected criminal case upends the precinct, testing perceptions of guilt, duty and systemic justice. The film’s plot repeatedly asks how quickly an audience decides someone’s guilt based on incomplete evidence.
Thiruvothu says the film departs from convention by revealing the central crime within its first 10 to 15 minutes, shifting the tension from whodunit to whether the officers involved will be found out.
The role marks Thiruvothu’s first time in uniform in a Malayalam film, though not her first police role. She played Kranthi Shenoy, a plainclothes deputy commissioner, in the Prime Video series “Dhootha,” and has dubbed the Malayalam-language version of a police officer played by Kareena Kapoor Khan in “Daayra.” Getting the physical details of Aleena right meant training, then deliberately undoing some of it. Thiruvothu learned the correct police salute during preparation, then had to hold something back on camera so the character would not appear well-versed in procedure.She also spent time on set with real policewomen, some of whom worked as extras on their days off, and separately discussed police procedure at length with Indian Police Service officer Ajeetha Begum in the past.
Thiruvothu has not watched “Santosh,” Sandhya Suri’s Cannes-debuting film in which Shahana Goswami plays a policewoman who takes up her late husband’s post through a similar compassionate appointment.
“I should probably write to Shahana and ask her if there’s a way I can watch it,” Thiruvothu says, noting that “Santosh” was blocked from release in India by the country’s censor board. “That in itself says enough about the movie as to why it’s important.”
The screenplay for “Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar” was written by P. S. Subramanian and Vijesh Thottungal. Thiruvothu credits Subramanian with the plot’s procedural logic and Thottungal with its emotional core, describing the narration as “two steps forward, one step back,” repeatedly revealing what audiences thought they already understood before raising a new complication.
Thiruvothu has been the subject of public scrutiny since 2017, when she spoke out about misogyny in the Malayalam film industry, and has since been active with the Women in Cinema Collective and in the aftermath of the Justice Hema Committee report. The committee, formed by the Kerala government in 2017 to investigate sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the Malayalam film industry, submitted its findings in 2019; the report was made public only in August 2024, after a Kerala High Court order, and detailed systemic harassment, wage discrimination and the blacklisting of women who spoke up.
“I feel like I’m constantly living that from being in public scrutiny,” Thiruvothu says. “Anything I say or don’t say, there is always a verdict placed on me. And that has been happening since I’d say 2016, since I called out misogyny in cinema. So I feel like most of the time when the cancel train comes, they cancel you, and then they like you again, and then they’ll again cancel you saying that, ‘Oh, you didn’t say anything about this,’ or, ‘You seem to have done that,’ ‘You seem to be on this side.’”
Asked about the state of activism in the Malayalam film industry, Thiruvothu points to the implementation of Internal Complaints Committees on film sets, mandated under India’s sexual harassment law but resisted for years by industry unions, as a concrete gain. “That’s a big win in terms of feeling safe enough at our workplace,” she says, adding that the industry still lags behind Hindi film sets in the number of women working as department heads, cinematographers and editors.
She also voiced deep skepticism of institutions in India that ask women to simply wait for justice. “Give me this one instance where a woman has been served justice. Give me one instance, and then I will trust,” Thiruvothu says of conversations she has had defending her decision not to pursue legal cases of her own. “The police couldn’t bring up a case where they showed proof that justice was served.”
She also argues that Malayalam actresses are given far fewer chances to recover from a box-office failure than their male counterparts, even as actors including Mamitha Baiju, Anna Ben and Anaswara Rajan have delivered hits. “The same choice levels or the number of choices that are given to anyone who is male in this industry has to be given to women and other minorities,” she says.
Thiruvothu is currently working on four projects simultaneously, including “Storm,” a production from Hrithik Roshan’s HRX banner with Prime Video, and the second season of “Dhootha.” She is also attached to two unannounced Hindi projects and to “Homo Sapiens,” an ensemble Malayalam-language film she describes as lighter than her recent work. She says comedy remains the genre she has not been able to break into.
“I so want to play rom-coms, comedies,” Thiruvothu says, citing Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” and Anne Fletcher’s “The Proposal” as reference points. “That is something that no one has even given me a chance to audition. I want to prove that I can do it.”
Thiruvothu describes her decision to remain in an industry that has, at points, tried to push her out of it as an act of defiance in itself. “My choice to continue to be in the film industry is probably going to always be one of the bravest things that I would do,” she says. “We need a foot soldier who doesn’t give up, and I’m happy to be that foot soldier. And by just existing in this industry, just existing here and refusing to give up, refusing to leave, that in itself is rebellion enough sometimes.”
She says she did not draw the parallel between her own choice and Aleena’s until she watched the finished film. “So for Aleena to say, ‘I’m not running away from this, I’m not going to run away, but I will protect myself and I’ll continue to do my job’ – I felt such a similarity,” Thiruvothu says. “I enjoy watching patriarchy fall apart. I enjoy it, so I would rather stay in.”
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