A Meditation on Silence, Mystery, and the Weight of Unspoken Truths

AGNYATHAVASI Director: Janardhan Chikkanna Cast: Rangayana Raghu, Pavana Gowda, Siddhu Moolimani, Sharath Lohithashwa, Ravi Shankar Gowda, and Yamuna Srinidhi

- A SHARADHAA

What we're often dominated by are noisy thrillers and formulaic crime dramas. Agnyathavasi arrives like a soft knock on a temple door. It doesn't beg for attention—it waits for you to lean in. Directed by Janardhan Chikkanna, whose earlier work Gultoo navigated the digital shadows of modernity, this film is a meditative pivot. It trades the tech-noir of neon cities for the wet silence of Malnad's forests, rewinding time to 1997. The pace is deliberate, the mood thick with mist, and the story is less about solving a crime than performing a ritual of remembrance.

Set in a remote village where modernity is still a rumour and the past seems to linger heavily in the present, Agnyathavasi opens not with action but with ritual. A station inspector (Rangayana Raghu) leads a life more akin to a farmer's, as his station hasn't seen a case in decades. The files are stiff with dust. The station bell is silent—a place more mausoleum than office. This stillness is broken when local scholar Srinivas Iyer (Sharath Lohithashwa) is found dead. At first, it seems natural. But whispers arise, and in this village, a whisper is enough to stir the dead. The bell rings again. The officer registers his first case in years.