Curry & Cyanide – Gripping Docu Plays Both Judge and Jury
One woman is accused of killing six people in her family over a span of 14 years, including a 2-year-old girl. The case, known in popular media as the Koodathayi cyanide killings, involves the alleged cyanide poisoning of six people. The prime accused is Jolly Joseph, a teacher (as she claimed) and mother to two sons.
Director by Christo Tomy, the 2023 Netflix documentary “Curry & Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case” is a rather straightforward string of interviews, interspersed with file footage of broadcast news snippets on the case. And as has become routine for Netflix documentaries, the creators also recreate scenes pertaining to the case for representational purposes to heighten visual engagement. This case rocked both state and national headlines in India, and news reports presented a sordid saga of an ambitious woman after easy money and a lavish lifestyle. Jolly Joseph allegedly murdered the first hurdle on the path of her dreams way back in 2002 – it was her mother-in-law Annamma Thomas.
The documentary opens with a picturesque drone shot of Koodathayi, the place where it all happened. “This could have been any house in Kerala, but what unfolded within its confines was something unheard of,” a voiceover says over the shot. What follows next is a rapid montage of news clippings setting ground for the 95-minute retelling of the killings.
Annamma’s death in 2002 was assumed to be due to a heart-attack, and no post-mortem was conducted as is common practice in middle-class families where the elderly die. Six years later, Jolly’s father-in-law collapsed and passed away in a similar fashion, and nobody thought it was unusual. Three years later, Jolly’s husband Roy was found dead in a bathroom that was locked from the inside. A post-mortem was conducted on the insistence of an uncle in the family called Matthew and the results showed cyanide in his system. Jolly told the family Roy was knee-deep in debt and must have committed suicide to evade payment. Everybody was satisfied with the explanation except Matthew, and he died in 2014. The last two victims in the case are 2-year-old Alphine and her mother Sily Shaju. Jolly married Sily’s husband Shaju a year after her death and that’s when someone on the family began to suspect Jolly’s hand in all six deaths.
With only two bodies out of the six showing traces of cyanide, there’s no concrete proof against Jolly, but the police claim Jolly confessed to all the murders. So, the documentary “Curry & Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case” unfolds like a lopsided “murderer profile,” where everybody except Jolly’s lawyer speaks with a sure-shot conviction that she was a murderer. The documentary largely hinges upon the testimony of Jolly’s sister-in-law, who, despite her best efforts, isn’t able to cloud the evident rivalry that existed between them. Although Jolly’s own son, who was only 2 or 3 years old at the time of his grandmother’s death/alleged murder, claims his mother had confessed to her crimes to him before her arrest. For a woman who is constantly branded as “friendly, neighborly” by people, it’s strange how the documentary makers couldn’t get one person to speak from a neutral point of view. There are no alternate theories at all.
If indeed, Jolly Joseph did kill all six people, she sure is no extraordinary serial killer, but an ordinary criminal who was able to get away with those murders because of a lackadaisical system and a prejudiced patriarchal society that undermines women. There are news reporters who exclaim shock over “how a mother could commit such crimes!”. Jolly Joseph probably took advantage of this very fact – that nobody would expect a devoted cheery mother to do any harm to anybody.
For those who don’t know much about the Jolly Joseph case, “Curry and Cyanide” offers an interesting look at how family politics, property disputes and half-hearted relations could lead to fatal consequences. Either Jolly murdered all six of them, only some of them, or none of them – but someone was able to cook up a convincing tale linking the trail of all six deaths to her. At the time of this documentary’s release, the trial into the Koodathayi cyanide killings was still ongoing and Jolly is yet to be convicted for any of the murders.
Stream the documentary on Netflix.
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