Avasa Vyooham: When the frog man made heads turn

Thiruvananthapuram: “What are you talking about”?, a producer snapped at Krishand R K, the director of ‘Avasa Vyooham’ which won the state award for the best film, when he pitched his idea a few years ago. Even some of his closest associates were skeptical. The film went on to get selected for IFFK competition section, bagged awards there and now won the state’s top honour for films.
Krishand, an adjunct faculty at IIT Bombay, had toyed with the idea of making a film after he finished a blog about two people recollecting a mermaid in Kochi. “I loved the narrative. I wanted to take a story on creature hunting. It slowly evolved into a story. We collected so much interesting data about nature and creatures especially frogs that I had to make it into a film,” said Krishand who wrote, directed and produced the film.
Conceived as an intriguing Rashomon-style narrative, it pieces together images of a man who seems to have a magical connection with nature. Krishand lets his narrative play out in crude local lingo and absurd humour dotted with sharp intercuts. Swiftly cut montage of creatures precedes moments of intimacy; the faces of participants captured in dim light and barely with a tinge of emotion. It is as though the narrative doesn’t let the characters take themselves too seriously.
“This is not an experimental film. For me the idea was a super hero movie, not the Marvel kind but of a different style like the movie ‘The Unbreakable’. I had intentionally chipped in scenes to enhance the credulity factor even without losing the gravity of the movie,” Krishand said. He said he was inspired by the narrative style of the book ‘Rant’.
There is an undeniable link between the frog and the protagonist. A brief shot of a frog caught in light is cut to a long shot of the very character startled by the light on his face. The analogy is evident. The narrative oozes with a direct, free-flowing strain of pun. A mangrove conservator ends up in jail for making bonfire in a protected area and he wonders “Does planting mangrove make a Maoist?”.
Krishand shot the film in brief schedules and the production spanned around four years. Along with his cinematographer, he would spend sleepless nights in Munnar documenting frogs of different varieties. They designed the prosthetics of the frog man inspired from the movie ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’. The movie is set to be released on OTT platform soon.