Chidambaram S. Poduval’s Balan: The Boy, featured at the Marché du Film at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year, arrives at a moment when Malayalam cinema is increasingly confident about its craft. On essentially formal terms, the film is accomplished – Farzana Palathingal’s lead performance carries a coiled, paranoid physicality that never asks for sympathy, the younger Adhisheshan and Muhammad Zinaan (playing Balan at different ages) are unnervingly natural, Tovino Thomas disappears into a deliberately unglamorous role and Sushin Shyam’s score moves between grief and dread without ever announcing itself. These elements have drawn widespread praise, even as the film’s intimate first half gives way to a more conventional, plot-driven second half that some found tonally uneven.Poster of Balan: The Boy, Photo: Instagram/@chanduveeyyy. But is a film only its form and craft? The question that lingers is whether craft alone can be the determining factor of a film, or whether a narrative that stages real social harms, exploitation of a mentally unstable woman, the moral corrosion of a child, the erasure of an abandoned mother’s dignity,carries an ethical obligation that style cannot resolve on its own.Balan: The Boy follows a mother, an ex-convict, who raises her son in a world of concealment, false names and constant flight. Balan grows up within this logic of disappearance. Without giving away the film’s late turns, the narrative eventually asks its characters, and by extension its audience, to watch desperation override conscience, most acutely in an episode involving a mentally unstable woman whose identity becomes a tool for the mother’s survival. The film does not pause to moralise this. It simply presents it and trusts the discomfort to do much of the interpretive work. This is, in one sense, exactly what serious cinema is supposed to do. A documentary obligation to ‘correct’ behaviour is not the same as a fictional film’s obligation to dramatise it. The movie does not appear to be asking viewers to endorse the mother’s choices, but to observe what happens when survival instinct overtakes ethical restraint. Depiction, in this sense, is not endorsement. The distinction matters and should not be distorted by reflexive offence.Where form and content begin to pull apartAnd yet, this distinction between depiction and endorsement is where the harder questions emerge. Critical writing on the representation of abuse in cinema traces a history in which films have reinforced harmful narratives, either through victim-blaming, through framing abuse as isolated instead of structural or through visual choices that aestheticise suffering without interrogating it. Ida Lupino’s Outrage (1950) is often cited as an early counter-example: even with constraints of its time, it centres the survivor’s psychological aftermath rather than the spectacle of the assault itself. The lesson is not that violence must be removed from cinema, but that framing, whose interiority is privileged, how the camera behaves and what is allowed to linger, determines whether a film questions harm or merely exploits.Screengrab from the trailer of ‘Balan: The Boy,’ Photo: Youtube/@Zee Music South.Another scholarly study of sexual violence in Indian cinema argues that a recurring pattern in Indian films is the transformation of rape and abuse into stylised spectacle, such as extended sequences, dramatic scoring and focus on the perpetrator’s power rather than the survivor’s interiority – often under the justification of “raising awareness,” while the underlying motive is closer to commercial appeal. The study claims that repeated exposure to such portrayals can normalise violence and reinforce the very patriarchal assumptions the films claim to critique.Balan: The Boy does not, surely, indulge in the spectacle this study warns against. There is no suggestion that the story lingers prurient over violence in the way some commercial thrillers have been known to do. Its sin, if it has one, is subtler: evasion. By situating its characters in a Kerala stripped of the welfare infrastructure that actually exists – such as Kudumbashree networks, the Child Welfare Committees, shelter homes run by the Social Justice Department and Kerala State Women’s Development Corporation and mental-health rehabilitation systems that, in reality, support vulnerable citizens – the film builds a vacuum that simplifies the moral landscape. While fictional license is part of storytelling, the gap becomes significant when a film borrows the authority of social realism while quietly obliterating the very systems that would complicate its premise. The result is a world where systemic support is absent and ethical collapse appears more inevitable than it may actually be. The survival theme lineageThis is where the film’s theme, survival as a force that dissolves conventional ethics, deserves to be placed beside its forebears. Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero uses post-war ruins and literal rubble to depict how a child’s innocence can be extinguished by an ideology favouring the strong over the weak. Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice uses a different mechanism, a state apparatus engineering an impossible choice, to demonstrate that under totalitarian terror, ethical behaviour can become structurally impossible. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange approaches the same territory, however, from the opposite end. It warns viewers that a state’s coercive correction of ‘bad’ behaviour can violate human dignity more seriously than the crimes it claims to cure. J. A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow strips away civilisation entirely, depicting extreme taboo as something closer to spiritual necessity once institutional safety nets have vanished.Screengrab from the trailer of ‘Balan: The Boy,’ Photo: Youtube/@Zee Music South.What distinguishes these films is the honesty of the vacuum: the absence of structure is not implied but absolute. Balan: The Boy, by contrast, adopts the emotional grammar of these films (the idea that survival strips away ethics), without inheriting the justification to do so. Contemporary Kerala is not a war zone, a concentration camp or a frozen mountainside. It is a state with a functioning, if imperfect, welfare apparatus. This gap is the film’s real ethical liability. There is also a faintly Dickensian undertone worth highlighting. Balan’s quest for his missing mother and his encounter with Abbas (Tovino) as a Fagin-like figure who introduces him to a survival economy built on theft, locates the film within a much older tradition of using the orphaned child to indict a society that produced him. Dickens, too, was accused in his time of romanticising the underworld he depicted. Nevertheless, his defenders argued, much as one might argue for Balan, that the unromantic and unflinching portrayal of juvenile crime was itself the social critique.Where does the movie leave the viewerNone of this means Balan: The Boy should be reduced to a checklist of social-realist failures. Its craft is experimental, its performances are committed and its central provocation, that survival can corrode conscience even in non-villains, is a legitimate and important subject for cinema to explore. But craft is not a moral explanation. When a film draws its dramatic stakes from the appearance of a broken social world, it invites scrutiny of the systems it omits. Form and style can make cruelty legible. But they cannot, on their own, make it ethically inert. The debate the film opens – whether a society sensitive to questions of consent, representation, and harm can still grant unconditional license to “the survival story” – is one the Malayalam cinema, and Indian cinema more broadly, will need to keep exploring, film by film, rather than settling once and for all.K.M. Seethi is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.