Aditya Shrikrishna

THE GAME: YOU NEVER PLAY ALONE is ominous not only in its title but also in its inaugural stature as Netflix India’s first Tamil original of the year. So far, Netflix has mostly dabbled in anthologies in Tamil; web series are a rarity. The world of web series is slow to take off in South India owing to factors like budget constraints, the scepticism about streaming within the film industries, and operational reasons from writing to production. It’s still at a nascent stage, even as OTT platforms introduce new series in several south Indian languages, and streaming itself is undergoing a churn in how it is viewed and operated. At this time comes The Game, a Tamil series starring Shraddha Srinath and Santhosh Prathap, written by Deepthi Govindarajan and directed by Rajesh M Selva. It takes long form’s trusted entry-level genre — thriller — and encapsulates it within a game developer’s world where digital objects become as much of a minefield as real life.

In Neeraj Ghaywan’s new film Homebound, Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter play Chandan Kumar and Mohammed Shoaib Ali, respectively, two best friends whose identities bolster their interpersonal dynamics as much as they make them precarious in their relationship to the rest of the country. Shoaib comes from a Muslim family in India’s Hindi heartland; his father is a farmer in his last legs, quite literally. His knees are done, and he is unable to tend to his field. Chandan belongs to a working-class Dalit family; his parents are laborers, and his sister, not the chosen one for education, cleans after the children in a local government school. These factors that make up the length and breadth of India’s fault lines don’t come between Chandan and Shoaib or their families. Still, two decades into the first century and almost seventy years after independence, they determine everything from the quality of daily life to their future.

In Athiyan Athirai’s sophomore film, Thandakaaranyam, the eponymous forests become a MacGuffin that is forever out of reach of the protagonists. It’s a story that’s ostensibly about the fault lines and simmering tensions between the state, comprising a nexus of the police, paramilitary forces that collude with politicians and conglomerates, and the tribal population that is given the unqualified title of Naxalites. The forests remain in the margins in Athirai’s film (his Irandam Ulagaporin Kadaisi Gundu remains one of the best debuts in Tamil cinema of the last decade); they are not landscapes for conspiracy, separatist forces or ambushes — it comes across as a conscious decision. The forest is more life and livelihood, one that is as one with the self as skin. But the forest security offices and the training camps, the locations where injustices truly roost, are the places of interest.

In Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl, the eponymous protagonist keeps returning to one question that hovers over her life like a single dark cloud obscuring the galaxy of stars beyond. “Naa yen ipdi irukken?” (Why am I like this?) The girl is Ramya, a name that is so commonplace in South India that it could be its own Jane Doe for half a country. For a whole generation that grew up between the 1980s and the first decade of the 21st century, the name bears no real characteristic. In a certain class of society, it is as regular as music class after school or the insistence to speak in textbook perfect English outside of the classroom. Bad Girl begins around the mid-2000s — a generation that was sneaking mobile phones into school and beta tested Orkut before the exodus to Facebook; so probably the last to stick to a name like Ramya. And yet, there are three Ramyas in the classroom. Bad Girl’s Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman), daughter of a teacher (Shanthipriya as Sundari) in the same school, is so feral that she strives to be the main character in her life, a life of banality according to her. The life of all Ramyas.

Dominic Arun’s new superhero film Lokah: Chapter 1- Chandra has a lot of merits but one of its boldest swings is the philosophy behind its villain. After all, every superhero needs a super villain. You take ubiquitous folklore like Yakshis which is bread and butter of every kid and every family in Kerala, so much that it is welded into its literature and pop culture (the iconic Srividya’s role in Kadamattathachan briefly appears in the film). And then when you need a villain to go against this Yakshi-as-a-superhero, you go for the latest but eternal bugaboo of the Indian state. The ideal man of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the practicing Hindu, fit and prim, following the sang’s defined code of Hindu culture, skeptical of every liberal idea, every free spirit, and sexist, misogynist, casteist to the core. How Dominic Arun and co-writer Santhy Balachandran craft him as this sneering pureblood mad man is one of the greatest aspects of the film.

Sandeep Balakrishnan (Mohanlal), a successful cloud kitchen owner from Kochi, possesses a generous heart. His tenants are three aspiring filmmakers who eat in his kitchen for free, and he treats them like his own children. They narrate their script to him, an ultra-violent revenge story that disgusts him to the point of disowning them. Even their insistence that “violence is trending” doesn’t change his mind. This scene, from Sathyan Anthikad’s new film Hridayapoorvam, is a comedic aside, but it also conveys the self-awareness of this film. It’s quintessential Anthikad — light on its feet, airy and like a warm beverage on a rainy afternoon, but now such a film wants to reinforce its merits. The saturation of high-octane mass entertainers has pervaded Indian popular culture so forcefully and brazenly that even a Malayalam film feels the need to acknowledge, course correct and advertise. But, no complaints, it is indeed nice to stay in a different zip code than whatever is trending.

“You don’t know anything about postmodern narrative”, bemoans the Malayalam writer, ghost writing a novel for a small-time, but battle-hardened, world-weary gangster from Thiruvanchipuram. The gangster is narrating his admittedly short but eventful story of adult life, his criminal escapades with four other friends. Crime wasn’t the choice they made. It was a byproduct of all their attempts to legitimise their lives out of oppression, a ticket out of their matchbox-sized slums. Arikuttan, charmingly played by Sanju Sivram, sits across writer Maithreyan, veteran in spirit (played by Jagadish) as well as pedigree, and tells him to go easy on the colourful digressions that the writer plucks out of his imagination. But Maithreyan wants that postmodern flourish, that bite of a story that functions as an adventure with an immediate judgment call laced with irony. It’s not surprising. The writer and director is Krishand, and the Sony LIV web series Sambhava Vivaranam Nalarasangham, or The Chronicles of the 4.5 Gang, has his stamp all over.

After five films, Lokesh Kanagaraj’s staples are now well known. His films teem with men embodying varying degrees of macho masculinity, vulnerability and identity crisis. Reluctant heroes drawn into battle against their will, their current pedigree not betraying their past or their abilities. The men of Maanagaram were only looking for love or an IT job or both. We don’t know what Dilli (Karthi in Kaithi) was doing before he went to prison. We meet JD (Vijay in Master) as an alcoholic college professor with no motivation to live for himself, much less for others. Vikram (Kamal Haasan in the eponymous film) retired to a life of geriatric parenthood and then he lost his son. Even Vijay’s Leo with his history of violence found a new name, new identity and an entrance into annals of the happy Indian family. And then shit happens. To all of them.