Director Santhivila Dinesh has waded into a Mollywood spat over who cries better on screen, and he's not pulling punches.

Cibi Malayil, who directed Mammootty in Thanicha Aavarthanam and several other films, had said that watching Mammootty cry on screen makes audiences feel it too. Dinesh's response: fine, but why is Cibi suddenly saying this now?

His theory, laid out at length, is that Mohanlal hasn't given dates for a sequel to Dasharatham, and that's what's really behind the compliment. "If it's true that the track is being changed because Mohanlal's date isn't coming through, that's understandable," Dinesh said, before adding that at 75, Cibi Malayil didn't need to say something this loose. He was careful to hedge, though — "that may be fair, or it may not be."

The scene-by-scene rebuttal

Dinesh then did what any self-respecting Mollywood buff would do. He built a scene-by-scene case for Mohanlal.

He pointed to Kireedam, Bharatham, Dasharatham and Sadayam as films where Mohanlal moved him to tears, multiple times over. In Dasharatham, he singled out the moment Mohanlal's Rajeev Menon asks Sukumari's Maggie if she could love him like her own son. In Bharatham, it's the scene where Gopinathan Haridas identifies his brother's body from blood-soaked clothes. And in Sadayam, the strangling scene involving Latika and her younger sibling, a moment so intense, Dinesh said, that Chaithanya, the child actor in that scene who is now reportedly a doctor in Australia, has spoken about how frightening it was to shoot, with the entire set going quiet afterward.

Against all that, Dinesh said, he can only point to one Mammootty performance that made him cry. The Balan Mash track in Thanicha Aavarthanam. "Nothing beyond that, in any Cibi Malayil film with Mammootty, has done it for me," he said, adding that Cibi himself seems to only remember that one film and nothing else.

A dig at Chandu too

Dinesh didn't stop with Cibi. He also took a swipe at Chandu, Salim Kumar's son, who had earlier claimed to have more swagger than Mammootty. Dinesh mocked the comparison, pointing out that Mammootty replies to fans, wishes people on birthdays, watches every film that releases and still keeps acting, and asked whether Chandu should first look at how many roles he's actually done before drawing that kind of comparison.

Cibi Malayil hasn't responded to Dinesh's comments yet. Whether Dasharatham 2 actually happens, with Mohanlal or without him, remains the bigger question sitting underneath all of this.