Kirubhakar Purushothaman

The film opens with the quote: “A hero will sacrifice the person they love to save the world, but a villain will sacrifice the world to save the person they love." This neatly encapsulates the film’s core idea. It examines two protagonists pushed to their limits, forcing them to choose between morality and self-interest—one emerging as a hero, the other a villain. At its core, Test has a compelling premise, but producer-turned-director Sashikanth struggles to transform it into an engaging film. The main issue lies in its characters, who feel artificial and distant, making it hard to empathise with them—despite strong performances from the cast.

‘Enter late and exit early’ is a popular screenwriting mantra that demands a writer start off the scene a bit late, narrowing it down to the important processing of the narrative, and exit before the resolution, leaving the audience wanting more. Director SU Arun Kumar has applied a part of this technique to the whole of Veera Dheera Sooran, which seems like a midpiece of a narrative. Hence, it’s numbered ‘Part 2’, despite being the first segment to get released. When we enter the world of Veera Dheera Sooran, it feels like you opened a novel midway. The characters are already established, and so are the origin of the context, and the motive of the characters. The film doesn’t wait for you to catch up, because it attempts to create a reality, where you are just an observer. It is indifferent to your understanding of what’s going on, and that’s the brilliance of Veera Dheera Sooran. It is more like reading a book than watching a film because it demands your investment. Things kick off when a husband complains to the police that Kannan (Suraj Venjarmoodu), an influential gangster, has done something to his missing wife and daughter. SP Arunagiri (SJ Suryah), who harbours vengeance for Kannan and his father Ravi aka Periyavar (Prudhvi Raj), uses the opportunity to end the two. When things get bad to worse, Periyavar seeks the help of an old friend, Kaali (Vikram), who is now running a provision store in a village. We are never explicitly told about all of their dynamics, but we seem to get it. That’s the splendour of the writing. You understand the characters by their actions, and not by what they say. Kaali is tasked with the job of killing the SP, but things take a different route when a hit job goes haywire.

The genius of Lucifer and Empuraan is that, despite spanning more than six hours of runtime (two films put together), the filmmakers continue to maintain the suspense about the origin of Stephen Nedumpalley (Mohanlal). What’s more impressive is the way director Prithviraj has scaled up this character. Stephen is not just a political kingmaker anymore. In Empuraan, he becomes much more, and to be honest, the conflict in Empuraan seems to be too small for him. That’s the downside of the film, as the villains are no match for the powers of Stephen. The first part, Lucifer, ended with a major reveal that Stephen Nedumpalley is a crime lord named Khureshi Abraham, a most wanted leader of an international syndicate. While Lucifer showed us, Stephen, Empuraan unravels his other facet: Khureshi Abraham. The film opens with a flashback to a violent riot in India. Director Prithviraj is clever in not delving into the details of the riot. Yet, the animated sequence of a burning train that kills Hindu pilgrims is enough to deliver the intended message. The aftermath of the riot leads to bloodshed and we find a kid named Zayed Masood, a lone survivor of a small Muslim community, which gets butchered, raped, and killed by Balraj (Abhimanyu Singh) and his bloodthirsty mob.

Sexual crimes have become the go-to place for filmmakers to find easy conflicts. It has become a license for all the on-screen violence of the protagonist and the viewer is expected to get a cathartic release seeing such revenge stories. In the end, the victim or the sexual violence itself is just reduced to nothing more than a conflict or a reason for the story. Trauma is yet another addition to the list of such Tamil films, which are on the rise now. However, director Thambithurai Mariyappan should be lauded as he at least doesn’t capture such violence with an exploitative gaze, which has become the norm. Such maturity is shockingly absent in other aspects of Trauma, which comes across as the work of a novice short-filmmaker. As far as the story goes, Trauma follows three narratives because it wants to be a hyperlink film, which is in vogue now (thanks to Lokesh Kanagaraj). We have two petty thieves who go about stealing cars. They are straight out of Tamil black-and-white comedy dramas because they seem to not even know how much a second-hand car would sell for. They wonder whether an SUV would sell for twenty thousand rupees, and that’s supposed to be funny.

Adolescence opens with a scene of a police officer DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) dealing with his son over the phone. The boy doesn’t want to go to school because of a bad stomach. When his colleague wonders if he will let him get away with the lame excuse, Luke says, “He knows Tracy (his wife) will say no, and I am a soft touch." The scene kicks off as a cute little moment between two officers and escalates into a volatile arrest sequence of a 13-year-old boy named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) as DI Luke and his team burst into his house. It takes a while to realise that the shot hasn’t cut ever since the first frame, and it doesn’t till the end of the episode. Adolescence has four episodes, each one done in a single shot, leaving you wondering how few sequences were even done. However, it is not a series that is all about technical excellence. After a while, you tend to forget the single-shot brilliance as the story is even more engrossing, taking you closer to a devastating state of parenting, the school system, and the rise of toxic masculinity.

In a sense, Perusu is one of the rare Tamil films that fit the adult comedy genre, as the premise of the story, directed by Ilango Ram, is as wacky as it can get. Halasayam, a respected man from a rural town, is fondly known as Perusu, a term used for an elder or a patriarch of a family or a village. He is one of those notable people of any town who have a say in its affairs. When we meet Perusu, he lands a slap on a youngster for allegedly peeping at women taking a bath in the community pond. Along with his elderly friends, Perusu orders the young chap to behave. Before leaving the place, he doesn’t miss to grin at the ladies himself. The lad resolves to have his revenge, but Perusu doesn’t give him any chance as he dies after returning home from watching TV. But the catch is that Perusu dies with an erect penis, which lands the whole family in trouble. His two sons–Saamikannu (Sunil Kumar) and Durai (Vaibhav)–try their best to ‘de-escalate’ the problem but it won’t die down. If you frown upon my double entendres, then imagine watching a film with such incessant phallic dialogues and words.

Gentlewoman is one of those films that leaves you with the frustration that rises out of lost potential. It could have been the perfect free-hand circle, if not for the last wayward bit. The circle is not all that misshapen, but you can’t look past the botch made either because when things are going well, it is seamless, until it is not. The mistakes, even though just a few, become conspicuous when everything else is perfect. Now, the film, directed by debutant Joshua Sethuraman, is good. The lamentation is about how it could have been great as it kicks off with a brilliant premise and subtlety that is rare in crime thrillers of Tamil cinema.

Abrodolph Lincoler is one of the outrageously funny characters in the American animated series Rick And Morty’s hit episode Ricksy Business. He is a genetically engineered clone with the DNAs of Adolf Hitler and Abraham Lincoln. He is an experiment gone wrong. The idea was to create a more neutral ideological leader, but in reality, he ended up becoming a person with disoriented ideas. Sample one of his lines: “Prepared to be emancipated from your own inferior genes." He is a diabolical cocktail of ideas. Watching Aghathiyaa reminded me of this character as the film’s ideology is as confusing as Lincoler. On one hand, the film, directed by lyricist Pa Vijay, has Dravidian newspapers Kudiyarasu and Viduthalai as some product placements throughout, and at the same time, it is a propaganda film about Siddha medicine that would make Periyar turn in his grave.