However, as viewers, we also enjoy the privilege of scrutinizing Shiva's actions by maintaining an objective distance, the editing careful enough to strike a balance between the two modes of vision.
This is heightened by the numerous extreme close-ups that parallel Shiva's daily act of blowing up each pixel of the woman's photograph. Karthick deftly uses repetition of framing and anachronistic editing of shots to give us Shiva's subjective experience of reality, marked by his distorted temporal sense that results from a life of monotony and isolation. And the closest he can come to any form of physical intimacy with another being is the red ant trampling around his bare chest while he sleeps. Shiva leads a life of solitude (we do not see any friend-figure until the very end of the film), on the periphery of which roams a number of felines and canines that he feeds every now and then. He gradually develops an unhealthy obsession as he tinkers around with the photo while playing and replaying other footage he has captured, the projector becoming one of the multiple unwitting enablers of his newfound vice. Sivapuranam is a wordless character-study that follows the subliminal trenches of one man Shiva, as he becomes fixated upon a blurry photo of a woman taken purely by chance. It is a significant opening shot that establishes a central recurring object and, through the shaft of projected light emanating from the aperture, mirrors a key theme permeating the rest of the film: the gaze (the 'ejaculatory force of the eye', as Bresson called it), and the way it invades shared and personal spaces by way of fulfilling repressed desires and shaping reality. Sivapuranam opens with a film projector, its light steadily intensifying until it becomes blindingly bright and a cut rescues us from vision impairment.