Imagine you’re invited to sit in a dark room and watch someone else’s nightmare play out on a screen. In real time. The chaotic flow of dream-events that are confusing enough when the dreams are our own flit by with little explanation. The music and sound effects are precisely keyed to keep you in a state of agitation. The second you think you’ve grasped a hint of meaning, that thread dissolves into something else. Kuthiraivaal is such an experience. This isn’t to say don’t watch the film. Quite the opposite. Debutant directors Manoj Leonel Jahson and Shyam Sunder accomplish a daring feat: a confounding dreamscape that weaves in myth, archetypes, maths and psychology.
In this dreamscape, a man wakes up to realise he has a horse’s tail. As the film proceeds, you start questioning if the man really is awake. It’s like one of those lucid dreams in which the person is aware that they are dreaming, even have a degree of control, but not enough to entirely change what happens. Saravanan’s (Kalaiarasan) attempts to cure his strange affliction is a frustrating exercise, worsened by the fact that no one else can see his tail. The tail flicks constantly, independent of his control, making him jerk every few minutes.
He seeks answers from others: an old lady full of stories in a far away village; a maths teacher he once knew who obsessively scrawls formulas on his basement walls; a young woman (Anjali Patil) whom we’re not entirely sure is human or wraith; a short-tempered astrologer. Yet each of their answers feel as if Saravanan is attempting to put together a complex jigsaw puzzle in the dark. With all of these elements, Kuthiraivaal could easily have collapsed into a pretentious film in the hands of less able filmmakers. Instead, scriptwriter G Rajesh keeps you hooked from the first scene to the last. He and the directors have delivered something that Tamil cinema has hardly witnessed before.
It’s not just that the story is unconventional or non-linear. The camera is almost perpetually at an angle, adding to our sense of falling down a rabbit hole. The score (by Pradeep Kumar) and sundry sound effects are deliberately off-kilter, expanding the dreamscape feel of the movie. And speaking of rabbit holes, Kuthiraivaal also slips Through the Looking-Glass into a Lewis Caroll world of mirrors and warped realities.
Kalaiarasan carries the weight of the film in an immensely complicated role. His Saravanan is an unremarkable just-another-face-in-the-crowd until his odd affliction draws us into his life, his memories and the darkness buried deep within them. This darkness ultimately leads him towards a piece of him he’d forgotten existed, towards light. The actor, so far seen mostly in loud, often brash roles that he performs with aplomb, shows you that he can just as easily do a character living in his own head most of the time. His agitation with his uncontrollable tail, his confusion, flashes of near madness become ours. We’re meant to be witnesses to his journey within, even if we’re not sure we particularly understand all that we see.
Anjali Patil in a smaller, but no less crucial, role brings to life a character whom we cannot say with certainty is even of this world. While Saravanan’s inwardness is one of chaos, hers is unsettlingly muted. Her name is Vaanavil (rainbow), but something has poisoned this play of light and water. Vaanavil’s ear is rotting. Why? Because of us. Because we’ve poisoned our air, infected our seas and rivers. “Once we used to live in villages bordering the mountains, the sun nestled behind those hills. The rain fell unfailingly,” she says. “But when we touched the mountains, the sun ran away up into the sky and burned a hole 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 seems to be boring into all of human history.
For a film that does it damnedest to throw us off balance, there isn’t a single shot out of place. Not one actor who doesn’t fit their role. Not a minute when even a note of music feels overdone. Kuthiraivaal nearly merits a genre of its own in Kollywood just because there are so few movies like it. Co-produced by Neelam Productions and Yaazhi Films, it premiered at the MAMI Film Festival in 2020 and was screened last year at the International Film Festival of Kerala and the Berlin Critics Week. Kuthiraivaal released in theatres on March 18.