Adoor Gopalakrishnan Productions

After years spent living off the modest wealth of his in-laws, a man hatches a desperate plan that draws his respectable middle-class family into a vortex of crime.

Mathilukal ('Walls') is a free adaptation of the novelette of the same name, written by the celebrated Malayalam writer, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. Autobiographical in character, it is set against the background of India’s freedom struggle in the ’40s when he was serving a term of imprisonment in the Trivandrum Central Jail. When the film opens, we see Basheer in a police lock-up, quite at home in the company of a few petty criminals. He has been languishing there for more than a year now without a trial.

The four chapters of the film tell stories, which are independent of each other. The only connection between them is the recurring theme of crime. With the flow of the movie, there is an increase in the complexity of the crimes.

This intimately-constructed drama traces the consequences of the tumultuous political and social changes that swept through India in the years since pre-Independence 1937.

A drama centered around four women at Kuttanad in Kerala's Alappuzha district.