Ageing between reverence and resentment: cinematic narratives of ageing and memory in Malayalam cinema

Kerala, with one of India’s fastest ageing populations, is undergoing profound transformations in intergenerational care as migration and the decline of joint families reshape traditional models of filial responsibility. This article examines two contemporary Malayalam films – Appan (Maju, 2022) and Falimy (Nithish Sahadev, 2023) – to explore how ageing is reimagined between reverence and resentment. Drawing on critical gerontology, the distinction between the ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ ages, feminist theories of relational autonomy, and South Asian scholarship on cultural memory and the ‘good death,’ the article analyses how cinema mediates the contradictions of later life in Kerala. Appan portrays a bedridden patriarch whose manipulative authority transforms old age into a site of suffocation, where death becomes a release for the family. In contrast, Falimy presents an octogenarian whose desire for pilgrimage to Kaashi invokes cultural memory of death as liberation, even as his family dismisses it as impractical. Through contrasting tonal strategies – grotesque realism in Appan and satire in Falimy – the films reveal elder care as an ambivalent practice shaped by obligation, resentment, and fragile recognition. The article argues that Malayalam cinema reimagines ageing as a socio-cultural negotiation in which dignity, dependency, and memory are mediated through narrative and cinematic form.