Elippathyam (The Rat Trap, 1981), which won Gopalakrishnan the coveted British Film Institute Award, features men in the grip of a moral and existential crisis. It is the first of a loose trio of films that focus on a life lived within the vestiges of feudalism, the other two being Vidheyan and Kathapurushan. All three feature males from landowning families who grapple with the challenge of living in a post-feudal era where they must radically reconfigure their senses of self, identity and home. While Kathapurushan is a fable of affirmation and acceptance, the protagonists of Elippathyam and Vidheyan choose not to integrate themselves into the processes of history. Put differently, they refuse to budge from a space that history, with the decline of feudalism, has emptied out, but instead make a mockery of keeping the past alive. This inevitably propels them toward neurosis and even death. Instead of aligning with the forces of modernity, the men regress to states of apathy or violent excess as they cling to the remains of structures that once sustained them. Denied the material resources and legal sanctions over which their forefathers once wielded authority, they find themselves hopelessly adrift in a new and unfamiliar world. As they continue to live within the brittle, eroded foundations of their ancestral legacy, the concept of home becomes complex, unstable and paradoxically synonymous with homelessness. Their liminal existence as outsiders stuck between past and present constitutes the subject of these films. This unreal in-between space becomes the site of their psychic dislocation, which takes the form of a neurotic obsession with power that they exercise either on their immediate family members or the community at large. And yet, officially, the men have no real access to power. This strange contradiction—power within powerlessness—only confirms their perverse otherness.

Set in the early 1960s in rural Kerala, Elippathayam features the middle-aged Unni, who lives with his two younger sisters in their sprawling ancestral house.