Kuthiraivaal review: Like a lucid dream, the film draws you into a strange world you must visit

Think about you’re invited to take a seat in a darkish room and watch another person’s nightmare play out on a display screen. In actual time. The chaotic move of dream-events which can be complicated sufficient when the desires are our personal flit by with little clarification. The music and sound results are exactly keyed to maintain you in a state of agitation. The second you suppose you’ve grasped a touch of that means, that thread dissolves into one thing else. Kuthiraivaal is such an expertise. This isn’t to say don’t watch the movie. Fairly the other. Debutant administrators Manoj Leonel Jahson and Shyam Sunder accomplish a daring feat: a confounding dreamscape that weaves in fable, archetypes, maths and psychology.

On this dreamscape, a person wakes as much as realise he has a horse’s tail. Because the movie proceeds, you begin questioning if the person actually is awake. It’s like a kind of lucid desires through which the particular person is conscious that they’re dreaming, actually have a diploma of management, however not sufficient to completely change what occurs. Saravanan’s (Kalaiarasan) makes an attempt to treatment his unusual affliction is a irritating train, worsened by the truth that nobody else can see his tail. The tail flicks always, unbiased of his management, making him jerk each jiffy.

He seeks solutions from others: an previous girl filled with tales in a far-off village; a maths instructor he as soon as knew who obsessively scrawls formulation on his basement partitions; a younger lady (Anjali Patil) whom we’re not totally certain is human or wraith; a short-tempered astrologer. But every of their solutions really feel as if Saravanan is trying to place collectively a posh jigsaw puzzle at midnight. With all of those parts, Kuthiraivaal may simply have collapsed right into a pretentious movie within the arms of much less ready filmmakers. As a substitute, scriptwriter G Rajesh retains you hooked from the primary scene to the final. He and the administrators have delivered one thing that Tamil cinema has hardly witnessed earlier than.

It’s not simply that the story is unconventional or non-linear. The digicam is nearly perpetually at an angle, including to our sense of falling down a rabbit gap. The rating (by Pradeep Kumar) and varied sound results are intentionally off-kilter, increasing the dreamscape really feel of the film. And talking of rabbit holes, Kuthiraivaal additionally slips By means of the Wanting-Glass right into a Lewis Caroll world of mirrors and warped realities.

Kalaiarasan carries the load of the movie in an immensely difficult position. His Saravanan is an unremarkable just-another-face-in-the-crowd till his odd affliction attracts us into his life, his recollections and the darkness buried deep inside them. This darkness finally leads him in direction of a chunk of him he’d forgotten existed, in direction of gentle. The actor, thus far seen largely in loud, typically brash roles that he performs with aplomb, reveals you that he can simply as simply do a personality dwelling in his personal head more often than not. His agitation along with his uncontrollable tail, his confusion, flashes of close to insanity grow to be ours. We’re meant to be witnesses to his journey inside, even when we’re unsure we significantly perceive all that we see.

Anjali Patil in a smaller, however no much less essential, position brings to life a personality whom we can’t say with certainty is even of this world. Whereas Saravanan’s inwardness is considered one of chaos, hers is unsettlingly muted. Her title is Vaanavil (rainbow), however one thing has poisoned this play of sunshine and water. Vaanavil’s ear is rotting. Why? Due to us. As a result of we’ve poisoned our air, contaminated our seas and rivers. “As soon as we used to dwell in villages bordering the mountains, the solar nestled behind these hills. The rain fell unfailingly,” she says. “However after we touched the mountains, the solar ran away up into the sky and burned a gap in our ozone layer. The hills flee from my grasp. It doesn’t rain anymore.” Anjali’s unearthly Vaanavil indicts us, skewering our guilt with a gaze that appears to be boring into all of human historical past.

For a movie that does it damnedest to throw us off steadiness, there isn’t a single shot misplaced. Not one actor who doesn’t match their position. Not a minute when even a word of music feels overdone. Kuthiraivaal almost deserves a style of its personal in Kollywood simply because there are so few films prefer it. Co-produced by Neelam Productions and Yaazhi Movies, it premiered on the MAMI Movie Competition in 2020 and was screened final yr on the Worldwide Movie Competition of Kerala and the Berlin Critics Week. Kuthiraivaal launched in theatres on March 18.