Fahadh Faasil’s Joji: A quiet storm of moody brilliance for your summer watchlist

Double, double toil and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble …

The witches, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth chant the incantation while standing around a cauldron.

But in Joji—Dileesh Pothan’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy—there are no witches, no kings, no battlefields. The cauldrons here are people, seething, bubbling with ambition, greed, resentment, and fury.

 It’s situated in the sprawling plantations of Kerala, where the real cauldrons bubbling over are people’s own ambitions, greed, resentment and fury.  Fahadh Faasil, who plays the titular Joji, is stewing, drowning in the potion of his own making.

Set in the time of the pandemic, as visible by people masking up: Joji, a deeply, unsettling haunting and brilliantly quiet film tells the story Faasil’s Joji, the youngest of three sons. Living in a large house where anything seems possible, he is his father’s nightmare, a disappointment, as he is a dropout and does nothing much all day. His father, Kuttapan, played by PN Sunny is the definition of toxic masculinity: Physical strength is everything. This point is driven through as he stands on his own son’s chest, insulting and abusing him. 

The eldest, Jomon, played by Baburaj, is an alcoholic and divorced. The second, Jaison, handles the estate. Joji exists in their shadow, until fate intervenes.

When Kuttappan suffers a stroke and is left paralysed, Joji sees an opportunity. Watching the once-mighty patriarch reduced to weakness fills him with a twisted sense of satisfaction. With subtle encouragement from his sister-in-law Bincy (Unnimaya Prasad), Joji begins a quiet, calculated descent into darkness.

Joji is one of Faasil’s most chilling performances, from his smirks, taunts, to the final scene: The unblinking eyes, showing that last bit of ruthlessness, twisted triumph and rebellion. He is determined to win, somehow.

Joji isn’t just a retelling of Macbeth, it’s a slow, simmering portrait of how ambition and resentment can boil over in the most ordinary of homes.