Pains and gains: The year in south Indian cinema

That crisis exists in Tamil too. It is only Telugu that possesses some secret sauce for pan-Indianness, a concoction so repetitive it stands at the doorstep of saturation (Pushpa 2: The Rule is its latest dilution). Yet, the south is routinely producing films the larger public yearns for.

It is a mistake to put all of south Indian cinema in one box. The four industries have different financial structures, and the calibre of writers, directors, actors and stars wildly differ. 2024 was a strange year for many reasons in the south—characters crossed borders, an industry learned a lesson, and arthouse mingled with the mainstream.

THE TRAVELLING MALAYALAM CINEMA

Malayalam cinema has legs. In 2024, the cinema went beyond Kerala’s borders. It began with the greatest swing of them all. Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Malaikottai Vaaliban drops us into the middle of a desert with vivid colours and prizefights. An unnamed universe where Vaaliban’s (Mohanlal) Malayalam blends with Rangapattinam Rangarani’s (Sonalee Kulkarni) Tamil, a harmony as fluid and precise as the swordfights with a Portuguese army. An Arabian Nights-inspired narrative that journeys through destinations was just a taste of things to come.

Girish A.D. recreated college final year and the immediate months after in the beautiful, often funny Premalu, a film that, like its male lead, punches above its weight class. It opens in Sachin’s (Naslen) engineering college in Salem, Tamil Nadu and travels to Aluva in Kerala. Sangeeth Prathap’s Amal Davis, one of the characters of the year, then takes Sachin to Hyderabad to a new world with new love languages. Heartbreak pushes Sachin to a pitstop in Chennai and then back to Hyderabad, with a bittersweet conclusion in London. It is only right that Sachin and Reenu (Mamitha Baiju) have their best moment mid-adventure on a train journey with him travelling ticketless.

Chidambaram’s Manjummel Boys took a fun bunch of rabble rousers, brigands, introverts and inner children to a tourist spot in Kodaikanal and produced a pop culture-infused survival thriller. In a new land, the men from Kochi who long to be boys flout rules, break barriers, irritate fellow tourists and fall to their almost-deaths. A rescue mission fraught with language, terrain, weather and regulatory dissonance is propelled by one artefact that binds them all together—a shared fascination for the tourist spot Guna Caves and the musical number Kanmani Anbodu Kadhalan from Gunaa, a 1991 Tamil film with Kamal Haasan and S. Janaki.

An engineering college, living quarters and the nearest bar become places of interest in Jithu Madhavan’s Aavesham, this time in Bengaluru. In this anti-gangster comedy, three students from Kerala find themselves in a new city and want to exact revenge on their seniors. They develop a relationship with idiosyncratic gangster Ranga (Fahadh Faasil) in a film that expresses macho rebellion only to pull it back every time with a neat, sensitive punch. Ranga’s gold adornments conceal a heart of gold; he speaks Kannada and Malayalam, plays dumb charades and teaches the boys about life and the futility of an engineering degree.

It wasn’t just the Malayalam characters but the actors who crossed borders. Nimisha Sajayan delivered a standout performance in Poacher, one of the best web series of the year. Kani Kusruti, a talented, under-seen artist till this year, was everywhere. After strong appearances in Killer Soup and Poacher early in the year, she dominated the conversation by its end with Shuchi Talati’s Girls will be Girls and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Her roommate in All We Imagine as Light, Divya Prabha added Cannes to her roster after Locarno and Rotterdam. And the legendary Urvashi straddled great performances—J. Baby in Tamil and Ullozhukku in Malayalam.

TAMIL CINEMA REDISCOVERS THE MID-BUDGET FILM

Every big-budget star film in Tamil disappointed this year. Venkat Prabhu’s The Greatest of All Time with Vijay was lazy and insincere. T.J. Gnanavel’s collaboration with Rajinikanth, Vettaiyan, came across as disingenuous. Shankar’s Indian 2 landed on the side of unintentional parody. The less said about Siva’s Kanguva the better.

It is the mid-budget films that propped up Tamil cinema—the kinds of films that were routine between 2010-2020, mostly by debut directors or filmmakers who were finding their voice. Prabhu Ram Vyas made his feature debut with Lover, starring Manikandan and Sri Gouri Priya. The film, about an obsessive, emotionally stunted man and a woman who grows out of a relationship and falls out of love, was a daring, mature attempt. C. Prem Kumar returned with Meiyazhagan six years after his debut, 96. We rarely see films like Meiyazhagan in Tamil cinema. Two men riffing off each other instead of brawling. Two men talking about love, people, politics, history, the land, water and air around them. Grown men crying about missing one another. Grown men crying for people they don’t know. Grown men crying for not being better than the other. A rare gem of a film, notwithstanding the makers splicing 20 minutes of some of its best parts after the first couple of days of its release.

Amateur cricket matches have never looked cooler than they did in Tamizharasan Pachamuthu’s debut, Lubber Pandhu. Venkat Prabhu did this in Chennai 600028 (2007), but that was an irony laced, tongue in cheek projection of street cricket. Lubber Pandhu is a stylised look at the camaraderie that exists at this level, and also the competitiveness. The invective-filled banter on the sidelines, the background music timed to player entries on the field, and a bold ending that calls for progression over conclusion—Lubber Pandhu had it all, while making a political statement like no other Tamil film in 2024.

FESTIVAL FAVOURITES GET THEATRICAL EXHIBITION

Anand Ekarshi’s Malayalam film Aattam premiered at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. After the Asia premiere in Mumbai, it had a theatrical release in January 2024. A quasi-chamber drama made by theatre artists playing something like themselves, it goes from a quiet rustle to a verbal storm when a woman from the troupe confides in her colleague and partner that she was sexually harassed by one among them. They hold court, perform inquiries, self-acquit, self-praise and self-criticise, all staged as a riff on 12 Angry Men. Life imitated art, as months after Aattam, the long-pending Hema Committee report on sexual violence and gender inequality in the Malayalam film industry was made public.

Don Palathara has made five films between 2015 and 2021 and rarely seen public distribution of his films. During the pandemic, some of his work made it to different streaming platforms. His latest film, Family, premiered at Rotterdam in 2023 and found a theatrical release in 2024. A sharp drama about the pitfalls of religion and community and how they disguise their inequities, one of the best Indian films of the year finally took one the country’s best working filmmakers to the theatres.

The same goes for P.S. Vinothraj. His debut, Koozhangal, won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam, but was unceremoniously dumped on a streaming platform two full years after its momentum as India’s entry for the 94th Academy Awards. His second film, Kottukkaali, probably the best Tamil film of the year, did even better. It had its world premiere at Berlin, and in August, producer Sivakarthikeyan put it in theatres.

Finally, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Grand Prix winner at Cannes, is a sensation as the awards season kicks into gear (it topped the prestigious Film Comment and Sight & Sound critics polls, and garnered two Golden Globe nominations). The film, with its three women who share a workplace and a part of their lives, is resplendent in its rain-soaked beauty amidst a clear-eyed appraisal of Mumbai and its traditions of working-class solidarity.

Kapadia’s first feature, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, also a Cannes winner, was a no-show in Indian theatres. But All We Imagine as Light made a quiet entry into cinemas. Its director, usually under the radar, came alive on social media, inviting people to the theatres, educating them on aspect ratio, encouraging protest if the film didn’t play in its intended form, and resharing the enthusiasm for the film on Instagram. The film, briefly away from theatres as the Pushpa 2 blitzkrieg hit screens, had a triumphant return in mid-December. It’s charming that Kapadia referred to the Bhubaneswar release of her film as its greatest achievement. From Cannes to Odisha, Malayalam cinema did indeed travel.

Aditya Shrikrishna is a freelance writer and film critic.