Vishal Menon

In the interviews leading up to the release of Vismaya Mohanlal’s Thudakkam, it’s writer-director Jude Anthany Joseph spoke about how the basic concept of the film had been in discussion, as far back as 2020. There’s been a whole host of similar films that have released since, but there’s no denying the film’s obvious lack of sheen because it has hit screens after all of those films have released. In terms of its messaging alone, Darshana Rajendran’s Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaye Hey comes to mind, with recent releases such as Blast in Tamil and Maa Inti Bangaaram adding to an unignorable feeling of déjà vu. In first viewing, Thudakkam also feels like the most dated of these films, relying on a gratingly obvious amount of self-seriousness, as though it’s the first ever film to say what it’s trying to.

Where does one begin while setting out to describe the control Arun Matheswaran’s exercises over his source material, in what is easily his most complete film? In a series of staging masterclasses, Arun finds crackling new ways to lift what’s on paper to deliver a moment that feels satisfying in so many ways that you forget that you’ve perhaps scene this exact situation plays out in a hundred gangster dramas before. You can point to the half dozen action blocks to make the case for Arun’s superior cinematic eye but it’s in the “smaller”, more tender moments that you see a new side to this filmmaker.

If Shaji Kailas began his career today, he would wrestle with the idea of starting out as a celebrated food vlogger. Even when he’s setting up major action sequences, he seems obsessed with the idea of staging confrontation around food. Speaking strictly of its novelty, this could be something as inane as framing an intro shot while placing a hot, steaming glass of lemon tea at the foreground. But the ideas that cracked me up in his new film were the subtle innuendos he’s packed in to trigger a conflict. Take the instance of five masked assassins walking into a small restaurant with the intention of creating trouble. One of them looks at the waitress and shadily asks if she will give him some “buns and milk”. It’s meant to sound as off as it does, but the dialogue delivery of the actor makes it sound crass. When the film’s hero, Paulson (Joju George trying his best), walks in upon hearing this, he sends the bad guy flying with a kick to his groin. As he flies across the screen, we see two eggs flying with the same velocity, landing at the centre of a frying pan. A second later, Paulson slashes a sword across another bad guy and instead of zooming in on the damage this causes, we cut to a shot of a banana that gets sliced into two.

The best parts of Con City are when it tries, quite successfully, to be a found family film. It has a gentle pace and takes its time to introduce us to its lead characters and the complex manner which they come to meet one another. If Saravanan (Arjun Das) and Mithra (Anna Ben) are pushed into a life of crime as a result of their respective predicaments, the mother-son duo of Janaki (Vadivukarasi) and Jackie (Yogi Babu) are who they are simply because they want to get rich and make a movie. There’s no overt moralism in them and the fact that they all know this about themselves, makes them a family we feel like rooting for. More than their need to stick together to remain free, we feel that it’s this lack of morality that has somehow kept them together.

The Boy, directed by Chidambaram, calling it a painful ode to lost innocence and a boyhood that never was—a heartrending drama about a son’s search for his mother, even when the film wanders a little too far from its core. Vishal admires how unengineered the storytelling feels; rather than a constructed plot, it plays like someone recalling the most vivid memories that defined his childhood. He traces Indhu (Farzana), who gave birth to the titular Balan in prison, as she and her son move from city to city, terrain to terrain, even religion to religion, assuming fresh identities and back stories while she reminds herself to trust no one. Vishal lingers on the duo’s outlaw spirit, the recurring sense of the past catching up with them, and the moments—a shopkeeper’s request, a marriage proposal, a heart-shaped earring—that each become Indhu’s cue to flee.

Subhash K Raj’s Blast is a movie that’s written for and around its high moments. It’s almost like Subhash knows how these moments will be received in the theatre, and he also understands the careful plotting and planning that’s required for them to land, once he allows them to. For this, he has figured out his own method to create a reasonably engaging action comedy around an idea that may have been too small, even for a short film.

First-time director Paul George’s Kattalan is what one may call a graphic novel movie. Almost all of its dialogues can be fit into two sides of an A4-sized page, and the effort that’s gone into it is only to re-create a storyboard that was made as a part of the film’s “writing”. As a film that follows the hyper-violent Marco in the same cinematic universe, Kattalan is a film that feels like it was forced to be made into a pan-Indian title. Apart from a handful of leads, almost the entire supporting cast is imported from all the other film industries of the country. Dialogues switch between Malayalam, broken Malayalam, Tamil, and English, and none of them delivers the impact it is meant to. And when they are not conveying plot points or exposition, Kattalan becomes home to some of the most pompous punchlines in all of our cinema.