Forged: Keerthy Suresh, Selvaraghavan
Director: Arun Matheswaran
“Pazhi vaangardhunna enna,” (what’s revenge?) asks Ponni (a terrific Keerthy Suresh) earlier on in Arun Matheswaran’s Saani Kaayidham. The movie from there’s an elaborate, creative and improvising reply to that very query.
Ponni is a police constable, belonging to an oppressed caste, within the coastal village of Paradesapattinam. When her husband asserts his political ambitions and self-respect, oppressor caste males brutally rape Ponni and set her home on fireplace together with her husband and teenage daughter inside. By means of the course of Saani Kaayidham, she, alongside together with her half-brother Sangaiyya (Selvaraghavan), seeks revenge.
The standout factor in regards to the movie is its craft. Saani Kaayidham is an exquisitely cinematographed movie, with Yamini Yagnamurthy displaying immense management. The intense large pictures kindle as a lot awe as vacancy. The close-ups are designed to shake the viewer, and shake it does. The attitude pictures are discomfiting — do we actually need to see the world as Ponni and Sangaiyya see it?
The auditory juxtapositions are additionally eerie — sound design by Sachin Sudhakaran and Hariharan M, audiography by Vinay Sridhar. At one level, we hear Ponni and Sangaiyya discuss burning a lawyer alive. All we see is Sangaiyya strolling to a different room and lighting his beedi. Within the background, we hear a human being set on fireplace. We instinctively think about the burning human physique, and it sends chills down our backbone. Arun Matheswaran finds dozens of such methods to make us expertise the violence.
Nagooran Ramachandran edits with a lightweight hand — the intent of the movie is to make the viewers expertise and even perhaps inhale the depths of violence. Sam CS provides to the eerie discomfort of the movie with a combined bag of a background rating. Underlining ugly homicide with ‘malarndhum malaraadha’ is nearly stomach-churning.
Keerthy Suresh is terrific as Ponni. She is in full management of her efficiency of ache, grief and fury. The scene the place she is crying in anger after which violently wipes her tears as she turns her wrath at herself for crying is one for the ages — a fast motion of her hand, 1,000,000 feelings to point out. She appears a number of leagues above her costars, together with Selvaraghavan, who does his finest. To observe her do that with the effortlessness that will betray most veterans is a gratifying realisation.
But Saani Kaayidham is just not a simple movie to look at. There’s a warning proper in the beginning to that impact. “Excessive violence”, it’s described as. Although I’m not sure that phrase does justice to what we’re about to see. “Blood and gore” wouldn’t lower it both, as a result of there’s extra than simply that. Sickles are lined with speckles of flesh. The sounds of crushing bones and burning our bodies are all the time within the foreground. The viscerality of acid being poured on the human physique is palpable, even when we don’t see the pores and skin burn.
Arun Matheswaran is enthralled by this degree of violence. He does his finest to not gloat in it. He makes an attempt to deal with emotion as an alternative of violence. As an example, there’s a scene by which Ponni murders a person tied up at the back of a Matador van. The body solely captures her. We see her punch — after all, we hear the breaking bones — and pour acid, her feelings going from anger to rage to insanity to vacancy. This scene is about Ponni’s emotions.
But, two-thirds of the movie is stuffed with intricately shot violence. After a degree, the wafer-thin storyline provides solution to the indulgent staging of murders. Because the movie moved ahead, the gruesomeness of the murders escalate. Arun Matheswaran breaks them with chapter titles, some sharp commentary like “Oru Ponni, Oru Saabam, Oru Samudhaayam” (Ponni, A Curse, A Society); others simply stoic observations like “The Matador Murders.” After a degree, Saani Kaayidham is a lesson on what number of methods to kill an individual.
That isn’t to say that the writing is flimsy. It isn’t. Even inside the mindlessness of the violence, Arun Matheswaran finds area to unnerve the viewers with philosophical questions. He taunts us with ethical dilemmas even inside the anarchic revenge saga — methods to kill a disabled teenage boy if you happen to suspect him of being a rapist? What ought to one other teenage boy have skilled for him to turn into a prepared get together to the violent act?
That doesn’t imply that the writing is robust both. It’s sufficient to stop the movie from changing into clumsy, however not sufficient to rise past its visible mastery. Arun Matheswaran plunges the depths of human depravity in Saani Kaayidham — a noble feat in itself. But, the movie feels as empty because the endeavour of revenge it traces.
