The Nocturnal Panopticon and Existential Decay: Surveillance, Absurdism, and the Ethics of Night Patrol in Shahi Kabir's Malayalam Film ‘Ronth’ (2025)

Abstract

This article undertakes a theoretically grounded reassessment of Shahi Kabir's Malayalam crime drama Ronth (2025), moving beyond genre-bound procedural analysis toward an interdisciplinary framework this study terms the Nocturnal Panopticon. Synthesising Michel Foucault's theorisation of disciplinary surveillance with Albert Camus's philosophy of the absurd, the framework examines the film through three interlocking axes: Spatial Incarceration, Chrono-Degradation, and Auditory Anomie. Rather than reading Ronth as a conventional police procedural organised around detection and resolution, the article argues that the film converts the routine night patrol into a self-enclosing structure in which the state's agents become simultaneously watchers and watched, eroded by duty rather than redeemed by it. Responding to reviewer concerns regarding methodological transparency and theoretical rigour, this revised version specifies the interpretive criteria and coding categories used to select and analyse cinematic evidence; interrogates directly whether Foucauldian discipline and Camusian absurdism complement or strain against one another; situates the reading within scholarship on Malayalam realism, regional identity, and Kerala's own policing institutions; and tests the Nocturnal Panopticon framework against two further Malayalam crime films, Nayattu (2021) and Kooman (2022), to assess its explanatory reach beyond a single text. The article concludes by outlining the scope, limitations, and broader implications of reading contemporary Malayalam crime cinema through combined Western critical theory and regionally grounded film scholarship.