Karnan

There is no bus stop at Podiyankulam. The buses pass in front of the village and do not stop. To take a sick woman to hospital you have to walk to the next town. The villagers have been petitioning for years and nobody answers. Karnan is young, angry and knows how to fight. One day they stop a bus and it grows. The notables of the next town count it an insult. The police come. The officer who arrives is set on punishing the village and his authority has no limit. Karnan had been preparing for the army entrance examination. Mari Selvaraj writes and directs. Dhanush plays Karnan; Rajisha Vijayan, Natarajan Subramaniam and Lal are in the cast. The language is Tamil. The ground rests on real events; police violence against a village in Tamil Nadu is the narrative's starting point. The matter it treats is caste and state violence; the film does not show them as separate things. The characters' names come from the Mahabharata and the choice carries meaning inside the narrative. Animals and symbols appear throughout; a headless statue, a donkey and a bird recur. The music is by Santhosh Narayanan and the songs carry the feeling of the narrative. The director's previous film also took on caste; the two belong to the same vein. The narrative does not justify violence but does not condemn answering it either. Its limit is the watching; the violence is hard, the narrative long, and some sections heavy. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil cinema and social narrative. Who it is not for: it is hard, long, and the ending bitter.