I

Lingesan, a bodybuilder, moves into modelling to get closer to the woman he loves, and reaches the top. When his rivals use a virus to deform his body and leave him hunched, the film turns into a revenge story. It is not interested in the fakery of the beauty industry. It is interested in how fragile the body is as an identity: the same man is rewarded while he is muscular and thrown out of his own home once he is disfigured. The form is built entirely on excess. Shankar's usual scale applies: enormous song sequences, shooting that reaches as far as China, and a makeup design that pushes the story away from realism and towards spectacle. A. R. Rahman's score is written to that scale. At the centre is Vikram's physical transformation: one actor on screen both as an inflated bodybuilder and as a man whose body has collapsed. The distance between the two ends of the role became the most discussed thing about the film. It was made on a budget of ₹100 crore and took roughly ₹240 crore, remaining Vikram's highest-grossing film until Ponniyin Selvan: I. Amy Jackson and Suresh Gopi co-star. Who it is for: viewers who love large-scale Tamil spectacle and follow Shankar's work. Who it is not for: anyone who will find a running time past three hours and the genre pile-up excessive. Love story, fashion, comedy, horror makeup and revenge all go into the same bag.