Parasakthi

In her fifth outing and first collaboration with actor Sivakarthikeyan, director Sudha Kongara crafts a relevant but way less than scintillating Tamil period drama that, notwithstanding the numerous censorial excisions it has suffered, makes full use of all the ingredients one expects from a star vehicle targeted at a mass audience. The balancing act is by no means easy and Parasakthi frequently teeters on the edge of a pulpy precipice. To her credit, the director, who is also the film’s co-writer with Arjun Nadesan, does not let the commercial aims of the project overly blunt the edges that the emotive subject matter imparts to it.

In Parasakthi — the 2026 version, not the seminal 1952 Krishnan-Panju film written by M Karunanidhi — Sudha Kongara often films Sivakarthikeyan in silhouettes. We meet Chezhiyan (helpfully working as a Tamizh name as well as a call to a revolutionary like Che) in 1959, and what we first see is his outline amidst darkness as he holds an effigy (the language of Hindi anthropomorphised) and threatens to stop a train. It is an immersive entry for a hero in a film based on the anti-Hindi agitations of 1965 in the Madras state. We see him as a student leader, an activist and a revolutionary. And the silhouette gives him shape and form, but not characteristics. It centres the movement and students as its ultimate progenitors.

Parasakthi – the 1952 film title holds significance for multiple reasons in Tamil cinema. The original was crucial for catapulting Sivaji Ganesan’s stardom and popularising DMK’s (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) ideology in Tamil Nadu, championing Dravidian politics. Decades later, Sivakarthikeyan’s Parasakthi, which tackles Hindi imposition, hits theatres ahead of Pongal. Does it ignite fire among viewers? Let us find out!