How Adoor Gopalakrishnan cracked the structure of psychosis seven years before Pulp Fiction
If a protagonist is blanketed in psychosis, how does a film narrate their story? The easier route is to let another character observe them from outside. But Adoor Gopalakrishnan chose the harder path. In Anantaram (1987), he lets the fractured mind speak for itself and finds a structure to match.
The film is built on Ajayan’s monologue. He narrates his own life, but not in sequence. He circles back, restarts, reveals what he had earlier concealed. The word Anantaram means “hereafter”, but when Adoor sent the subtitled version to festivals, he added an English title: Monologue.
Film discussions often credit Pulp Fiction (1994) with pioneering the circular narrative – three stories folding into one, chronology scrambled, meaning emerging from repetition. But seven years earlier, Anantaram was already doing something similar, and arguably more demanding. Tarantino’s structure is playful. Adoor’s is diagnostic. The loops exist because Ajayan’s mind cannot narrate any other way.
There is an apocryphal story about the film’s origin. After his fourth feature, Adoor’s wife returned from a hospital check-up and mentioned something she had overheard – a newborn abandoned by its mother, later adopted by a doctor. Whether this was the seed or simply a fortunate collision with ideas already forming, Adoor built the opening scene around it. The abandonment becomes the root of everything. Later, as a teenager, Ajayan confides to his stepbrother Balu that if he ever finds his birth mother, he would strangle her.
The first half traces effect. We watch Ajayan’s isolation calcify. A crush on his senior Latha goes nowhere. He has no friends his own age. In his own words: “I don’t know the reason, but even in my age group, there was no one I could call a true friend. I had nothing to say to them, nor they had anything to offer me either.” His only companions are Dr. Uncle, with whom he takes evening walks, Balu who visits during vacations, and the old servants of his stepfather’s household – the same servants who feed his young mind with mysticism, further clogging his thoughts.
Ajayan narrates himself as an all-rounder, excelling at everything, alienated by his own excellence. Teachers resent how much he knows. Classmates recoil from his sarcasm. By adulthood, he is more alone than ever. When Balu marries Suma, her presence begins to unsettle him. Nothing is explained through dialogue. Mankada Ravi Varma’s cinematography does the work – watch the shifting light on Ajayan’s face during the wedding, the duality made visible.
The second half traces cause. Ajayan restarts from childhood, but now he reveals what he had omitted. Some moments tip into the extramundane – interactions with servants that feel not quite real. He speaks of Nalini, a woman he has fallen for. But is Nalini a person or a fabrication, conjured from his muddled fixation on Suma? When the protagonist cannot tell, neither can we. The film does not clarify. It implicates.
So the first chapter shows what happened to Ajayan. The second chapter shows why. And then comes the third return.
“I am not sure if I have told you the complete story,” Ajayan says. “There may still be things I have forgotten to relate.”
We see little Ajayan at the top of a flight of steps leading to a riverbank. He skips down, counting aloud – odd numbers only, reaching 37. He runs back up, repeats the descent, this time counting even numbers, reaching 38. He turns. He looks directly at us. The screen freezes on his confused face, every line in the frame converging on him.
The film ends. But it does not conclude. We are left to fuse the chapters ourselves, to project forward into the “hereafter” that never arrives on screen.
Psychosis does not permit a clean telling. So Ajayan tells it twice, three times, each version circling closer to a convergence he cannot reach. The structure is not a gimmick. It is the only form his mind would allow.