9

Jenuse Mohamed's 2019 Malayalam film follows an astrophysicist who travels with his son to a remote mountain observatory. The awaited celestial event disrupts the earth's magnetic field for nine days; the power fails, communication is cut, and father and son are completely separated from outside. What is interesting is the joining of a science fiction premise to a story of grief. The boy has not accepted his mother's death, and whether what they see in isolation is real or something the loss produced is left unclear for a long time. Prithviraj Sukumaran leads. The production is ambitious at the scale of Malayalam cinema, and the visual effects go beyond what is usual there. The narrative attempts an explanation in the final section and loses some of its tension doing so. Who it's for: those who like Indian science fiction experiments and genre mixtures. Who it's not for: viewers expecting tightly built science fiction; the explanatory section is not convincing.