New Delhi, Dec. 26 -- Lokah is far and away the best commercial film of the year, yet little that it does is blazingly new. Instead, it excels as precisely calibrated popular filmmaking that respects its audience's time and intelligence. Director Dominic Arun and star Kalyani Priyadarshan fuse superhero movie dynamics with yakshi myths to offer an alternative vision: sleek, stirring and feminist.

Recent franchise films have struggled to contain origin stories, often stretching them over half or more of the running time. Lokah dispenses with its heroine's past in 15 crisp minutes. First, young Neeli (Durga C. Vinod) is bitten by a bat. Then, as she and her tribe are persecuted by the king's soldiers for praying at a temple, a soldier runs...