Reading Mysskin’s Serial Killers Through Bataille and the Buddha

This essay analyzes Mysskin’s films Onaayum Aattukkuttiyum (2013) and Psycho (2020) through the philosophical lens of Georges Bataille, particularly his theories of transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred. It argues that Mysskin’s serial killers embody Bataillean figures who rupture societal taboos, seeking a form of continuity or sacred experience through extreme violence, consequently challenging normative perceptions of morality and order. Bridging these cinematic and theoretical worlds, the study illuminates a shared genealogy rooted in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose existentialist inquiry into the ‘humiliated’ and the ‘underground’ informs both Bataille’s concept of sovereignty and Mysskin’s characterization of the transgressor. The analysis additionally engages with the Buddhist subtext, especially in Psycho, to examine themes of suffering (dukkha), impermanence (anicca), and the prospect of redemption, offering a unique Eastern philosophical counterpoint to Western existentialism—and it is precisely where these threads converge, where Bataillean transgression, Dostoevskyan existentialism, Buddhist metaphysics, and a distinct cinematic idiom of nocturnal esthetics and embodied otherness meet, that Mysskin emerges not merely as a genre filmmaker but as a moral philosopher of the margins, one who locates the sacred precisely where society most insistently averts its gaze

Interrogation · Narrative · Noise (video) · Reading (process) · Contemporary Cultural and Social Studies · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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