Raayan

Raayan runs a small food shop in Chennai. His family is all he has; he has two brothers and a sister and raised all of them. There are no parents. Raayan stays out of fights and tries to keep his siblings out too. One of the brothers is running with the wrong people. One night there is an incident and the family is caught in the middle of a gang matter. Raayan first tries to close it. It does not close. So he uses his own method, and it is something he has never used before. Dhanush wrote, directed and played the lead. Dushara Vijayan, Sundeep Kishan, Kalidas Jayaram and Selvaraghavan are in the cast. The language is Tamil. It was announced as Dhanush's second film as director and his fiftieth as an actor. A. R. Rahman wrote the music. The matter it treats is protection; every decision Raayan makes is about protecting his siblings, and the film shows that protection is a kind of violence too. The narrative proceeds in the shape of the urban crime film and puts the relationship between the siblings at its centre. The action is at close range and the cutting hard; the narrative avoids display. Its limit is structure; the plot is crowded, there are many characters, and the last section speeds up. Another limit is the women; the narrative does not make enough room for them. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil crime films and Dhanush. Who it is not for: the violence is very explicit, it runs long, and the shape is familiar.