Jana Gana Mana — Dijo Jose Antony, 2022 | Malayalam

A courtroom thriller that puts the media on trial and finds everyone guilty.

There is a moment in Jana Gana Mana where a character poses a question that the film spends its entire runtime refusing to answer cleanly: is the media there to provide the truth, or has it become the truth itself? It is the kind of question that lands differently depending on which country you're watching from — but in 2022 India, it lands like a verdict.

A wave of Indian films has emerged in recent years that treats the media not as a neutral conduit but as an active shaper of reality — Jalsa with Vidya Balan, the Kartik Aaryan thriller that took a similar scalpel to public outrage, and now Jana Gana Mana, which is perhaps the most structurally ambitious of the lot. The pattern is not accidental. These films exist because audiences recognize something in them. The general drift toward anti-media narratives in Indian cinema is not a trend so much as a symptom — of a public that has grown deeply, and not unreasonably, suspicious of the machinery that tells it what to think.

The plot of Jana Gana Mana is, on its surface, procedural. A female professor is found raped and murdered, and the incident ignites a campus revolt across India. Students demand accountability. The government is pressured. In the midst of the chaos, a police officer steps forward and methodically works to bring the perpetrators to justice — navigating a system that seems designed to obstruct him at every turn. When he performs an extrajudicial encounter killing of the four accused, he is celebrated as a hero. Justice, swift and decisive.

The people rejoice.

And then the film keeps going.

A human rights lawyer brings the officer to court, questioning whether shooting men who were never convicted — who were, legally speaking, still accused — constitutes justice or murder dressed in uniform. The film does not let either side win cleanly. That refusal is its greatest strength. Jana Gana Mana is not interested in giving you a position to settle into. It is interested in making you examine why you wanted one in the first place — and what role the media played in constructing that desire.

Anti-media as a cinematic theme matters precisely because it has emerged from something real: a world in which the sources we trust to validate reality have become instruments of something else entirely. Rather than a foundation for independent thought, media has too often become the mechanism by which we are sorted into predetermined conclusions. Jana Gana Mana understands this, and builds a film around it that is both a genuine thriller and a genuine argument. The two things hold together surprisingly well.

Watch it. Then think about the last three things you believed because you read them somewhere.