Kuruthi is brooding tale of vengeance and grit told through the ingenious conceit of the often-underused sub-genre of the home invasion thriller. Kuruthi is structured as a tightly knit thriller that unfolds within the confines of a house where the duality of religious fundamentalism and hatred take shelter for a seemingly never-ending evening of gore and fanatic revelations.

Prithviraj deserves to be lauded for his conviction in sticking his neck out by investing in such a risky project that supposedly deals with delicate themes.

The director Manu Warrier resorts to good old-fashioned filmmaking with the use of dual focus shots , extreme close ups of tense faces and spilt diopter lenses to stress on the building sense of dread within the limited setting and extracts tension with fiery exchanges between the characters trapped in their own living hell.

I'm attributing the entire 2.5 stars to Mamukkoya's portrayal of Moosa Khader. He's dripping with swagger from start to finish. The rest of the film doesn't hold up. The pedestrian screenplay treatment and the superficial dialogues do not help. Performances are fine, since Kuruthi boasts a talented ensemble, but the half-baked writing struggles to keep viewers excited about the fates of these characters. The first half definitely towers over the second, but the moment the exposition around religion starts to unfurl, Kuruthi becomes infinitely less exciting. The screenplay is only looking to tick all contemporary boxes centered around religious hatred, and not offer any fresh commentary on the same. That being said, it still takes guts to make movies (or create content) around flammable topics.

Ignore the didacticism and you get a hard-hitting moral lesson in Kuruthi (Holy Slaughter),where one night a male-only family finds its house turn into a battleground between religious men and woman who are out to settle scores. Despite the lopsided screenplay, it's well-shot, has gritty music, and holds Mamukoya on an invisible pedestal as he rightly should be. I would watch this again just to enjoy him snap and talk the truth about the world that we live in.