Vishal Menon

It doesn’t take Dhanush more than five minutes to both frustrate and fascinate you with his filmmaking. In one scene, we see Murugan (Dhanush) on a video call with his fiancée Meera (Shalini Pandey) after returning to his village. Murugan is in Tamil Nadu and she’s in Bangkok; he is poor, and she is rich. But instead of using a line or a frame to underline this disparity, director Dhanush stages Meera outside her mansion, seated on the bonnet of a white Rolls Royce. The next time we see her, she FaceTimes Murugan with a champagne flute in hand, strutting around the deck of her yacht. And in a silly line, her wealthy father Vishnu Vardhan (Sathyaraj) explains to his spoiled son: “We millionaires don’t get to where we are in life just because of hard work and talent.”

Set in the one of the border towns of Palakkad, bang in the middle of both Kerala and Tamil Nadu, is a surprising film that borrows its sensibilities from both Malayalam and Tamil cinema. The writing, about four young kabaddi players and how they’re slowly absorbed into the world of crime and corruption, feels planted and subtle, like a solid Malayalam slowburn. But the colours of these scenes are dynamic, the sounds loud, and its treatment a lot like that of the rooted Tamil cinema of the 2000s.

There were instances during Karam where you are led to believe you’ve entered into the wrong screen at the multiplex. This begins right from the first shot when when we’re asked to guess if a particular chase is taking place in India or elsewhere. Of course we see Noble Babu Thomas (Dev) in the frame and we’re told that he’s just missed a shot at the most notorious militant in the world, but the imagery is so devoid of specificity that it could be any Mallu action hero running away from bad guys in any continent in any part of the world and it wouldn’t make a difference. A scene later, it’s when Dev gets court-marshalled that we learn that these two are Indian soldiers, out to take on a threat against India. The generic Europeanness of the location is something we need to interpret as the story taking place in some idyllic North Indian hill station, along the lines of Shimla.

It must have been some sort of a cruel in-joke to name the company Ashwin Kumar (Asif Ali) runs ‘Pure Facts’. It’s an online media company based out of Coimbatore, and we listen to Ashwin talk repeatedly about how he doesn’t believe in sensationalism or emotions, believing in a brand of objective journalism that provides pure facts to its viewers. You assume that he’s the stereotypical idealist but there’s always a dissonance between what he says and how he behaves. A few scenes later, after he’s tried to convince us of his ethical ways, he nonchalantly reveals how his modest operation makes money. Without making it sound like blackmail, he says he investigates the inner workings of big corporates and agrees to not reveal them on his platform for a “fee”.

After a series of underwhelming misfires, Madharaasi brings back glimpses of a forgotten AR Murugadoss that had made him our top commercial movie director. This isn’t just because he still has it in him to stage elaborately choreographed, neatly cut action blocks. This isn’t because he knows how to pander to a star’s fan base and still make a film relatively entertaining to the star-agnostic. The reason Murugadoss remains a brand is because he continues to have the ability to sell you a far-fetched high concept that sounds outlandish, but without allowing you to think of just how impossible all of it is. In Madharaasi, this includes a setup that tells you that six containers filled with the latest guns are just one toll gate away from entering Tamil Nadu. Fifteen minutes later, he sells you another concept, this time about Raghu (Sivakarthikeyan), a man who suffers from delusions after he witnessed his entire family getting charred to death as a child. But instead of using this just as his backstory, the PTSD has given Raghu superpowers, the sort that let him take on a tiny army when triggered.

In Shan Thulasidharan’s frantically paced Kammattam (Coinage), not a minute is wasted to push us into the world of crime. A man named Samuel (Jeo Baby) has been struck down by a moving car, and it’s clear, right from the word go, that this “accident” was very much intentional. A police officer named Antonio (Sudev Nair) is deputed to investigate. Within the first 10 minutes, the crime, the world around and the people involved have all been established with reasonable efficiency. Samuel is said to have had a chequered past, and this makes him susceptible to almost everyone around him, including close family. The red herrings are laid out with similar swiftness, and by the end of the first episode, we’re left with a handful of suspects, each with enough reason to have committed the crime(s).

Lokesh Kanagaraj is no longer a “young” filmmaker. He’s been around for eight years and six films, and it’s become easy to predict the exact manner in which he works on his screenplays. Back when he introduced the Gatling gun towards the end of the much-loved Kaithi, we didn’t just get one of Tamil cinema’s most exhilarating climaxes, we also got a textbook example of what one can do with a great Chekhov’s Gun. Five films and an artillery later, you’re able to make out the beats of what he’s trying to achieve, hours before his films get there. So when we saw a happy picture of Parthiban/Leo and family feeding their newly domesticated hyena, you could sense that the wild animal would make a return later on in the film. And by the time we hit Coolie, our minds are working overtime when a pointless character walks past a closed door with another pointless character revealing how lethal the inmate of that room is. It may have been a gun in Kaithi, a canon in Vikram, a box and arrow in Master and the Hyena in Leo, but with Coolie, Lokesh has possibly realised that he’s making a film so big that he can now afford to cast a full-time superstar from another industry as his Chekhov’s Gun.