Prathyush Parasuraman

Love is a risk we endure. In a sense, then, love stories become thrillers where the stakes are not of life, but of the self—will the self survive love? For love turns stone-faced, gruff voiced men into pouty mush pots and softens the hardened boundaries of women—you almost don’t recognise people in love. Love ruptures the self, and something new emerges out of it. The best love stories, then, tease out this tension, this emergence, and revel in it, goad it further, while the worst think of this tension, this emergence, as reluctant plot pushers.

Karthik Subbaraj has always insisted that he does not make films. He makes a padam, which, to be clear, is not just a literal Tamil translation of “film”, but is a separate ontological category. It says something hazy about genre, form, formula, and Subbaraj keeps theorising and re-theorising the padam with every new film he makes. Roughly, his padams chase moments of melodramatic coincidence, full of unwieldy ideas and wild insertions of plot, sculpted in camp excess and winking indulgence, with morality always at the centre of the story, where characters will ultimately revel in moral displays of affection.

Gondhal begins with what is, roughly, a 25-minute single shot at night. It follows an old man, Bhivaba (Kishor Kadam), and his grandson Vishnu (Dhruv Thoke) walking towards the gondhal, a ritual folk celebration in the village for newlyweds, and on that long-ish walk, the old man meets other men, and gossip is exchanged under the guise of curiosity, resentments are expressed under the guise of conversation, and the child’s curiosity is mistaken for his personality—he only seems to ask questions: What is this? Why is that?

I can understand why people warmed up to Modha Rathri (now out on Netflix). In a landscape ransacked by Anirudh’s BGM shoring up reluctant films and heroes whose heroism is leaning more towards parody than piety, here is a film and filmmaker—debutante Raja Karuppasamy—who dared to tell an intimate, many-splendoured story set over the course of a day. Based on events that director Karuppasamy has himself witnessed and endured, casting family members, there is a warmth here that filters through even the most devious observations of its heady, nauseating cast of characters, and a desire to tell a story that means something, where reformed characters are, in fact, part of the arc—but Karuppasamy does this without flat finger-wagging. A clutter-breaking miracle.

Aiming for a boar on the other side of the river, the Anghbha (Anghlong Konyak), or tribal chief, sights a “white ghost” floating by—a flesh and blood American missionary (Douglas James Henshall) on a boat, with his jeep and some Nagas who have converted. The music is ominous. The ghost waves at him—does the Angbha understand this gesture? The ghost takes out a camera and captures him in film—does the Angbha understand this technology? All we see is his face, shaped by doom. He is hunting the boar with a gun, and not bow and arrows, nor spears, so technology has seeped even into his cloistered world from beyond. What else has slipped through the cracks? What has he resisted?

Bearded, unkempt, brash, and smoking, the Tamil film hero is no obvious object of desire—they get sloppy drunk; you see them waking up hungover; they romance reluctantly, and then recklessly; their lips are cracked, their skin discoloured; if you kiss them, your skin might scrape off; grooming is unbecoming. Charisma, then, is what elevates them to heroism, that ephemeral star quality of re-framing even bad breath as a sign of a night spent sleeping under the stars. The actor Soori, whose very visage is an image of innocence, stepping into this heroism in Mandaadi, plays this charismatic abrasiveness as sincere and patient—this is not collar-up coolness, but button-up kindness. Soori, after stepping away from comedic gaffes and supporting characters, has embraced being the central, impregnable presence in films like Viduthalai (2023-24), Kottukkaali (2024), and now Mandaadi.

When storytellers say they have made a film to inspire people — red flag! Abort! For the kind of people who make movies to inspire others are, perhaps, those least capable of evoking inspiration — or worse, they feel like they are catering to a baseline stupidity. People aren’t inspired by formulas, or at least people with half a mind aren’t. At best, it can make them simper in theater halls, whacked over their heads with a background score that can even turn a dead man into a pound of goose flesh. But when you return to the thick materiality of your life, you forget that goosefleshing. To truly inspire people, you have to recognise that nothing moves mountains like honesty, like humanity. The best biopics — a genre we are facing a glut in, including Madhavan’s limp Rocketry: The Nambi Effect (2022) — know that ideas can never do the heavy lifting of a life well lived. At best, it can serve as a placeholder.

In the second season of Vadhandhi, M Sasikumar, yet again, takes up the mantle of the “nice guy”—stiff kindness and earnest intention buoying his character through narrative pretzels. Here, he plays Moosa Raaza, a Muslim Investigating Officer (IO) in Madurai—a punishment posting. He cooks, he is kind, he is deeply religious. A namazi who gets to his knees at each of the five bends of the day—in a court, at the police station—his faith is expressed through actions that dot the show’s landscape. He vowed not to shave his beard after coming back from Hajj, in the hopes of his wife conceiving. This rankles his superiors, who think the beard goes against their decorum. He fights them in the court and wins. His wife gets pregnant and is nursing the unborn child elsewhere. These fights and systemic traumas soon recede into the background as the central plot kicks in. Being a Muslim character does not serve any narrative provocation. Instead, two skeletons found when a mound is dug up to build a highway usher in Moosa’s character arc as he is brought in to investigate. He has the full support of his superior SP Rathika (Anagha Maruthora), who not only trusts his intuitions, but takes responsibility every time it backfires.