24 frames per second

A boy is brutally thrust into adulthood when his parents go missing and he has to care for two younger brothers and an infant sister. When you see him as an adult, he appears to be a man whose expends so much energy suppressing his rage against the universe and doing what is required for his family that his facial muscles have no more strength left to crease into a smile. What little tenderness he can find within him, he reserves for his sister. And that choice might just be his undoing.

The adult Raayan appears to be a man who does everything he can to avoid violence. But a couple of conversations make it clear that this is not a man to be trifled with. (There is mention of a violent incident a few years earlier but you find out what it is only much later.) For the most part, while little bits of violence sporadically erupt around him, he stays out of it. But he’s not always afforded that luxury, and when one brother’s action brings mayhem to their doorstep, everything explodes.

The first act is as good a piece of writing as any I’ve seen in a film of this nature. There are two warring gangsters holding themselves to a tenuous truce, and a cop who plans to stir the pot. And while this is going on, the family drama playing out in the Raayan household adds an element neither the gangsters nor the cops could have anticipated. Where Dhanush scores is in creating drama out of a situation that happens more or less at random, but involving characters who aren’t — everyone’s behaviour at this climactic moment is established through earlier scenes.

As blood soaked as the frames are, what makes this film noteworthy is that it is actually written as a drama with strongly etched characters, who are placed in a volatile environment that makes the happenings seem not just plausible, but almost inevitable. The film does flag in the third act, and the bloodletting gets almost tiresome after a point, but there is a cold arithmetic to how the story proceeds. Raayan’s protectiveness of his siblings is never in question, but you also see how, from their standpoint, things could appear unfair. You get two brothers who have beef with their oldest sibling, but they are written as distinct characters, not archetypes. (Think about it — could you tell Dilip Dhawan and Raja Bundela apart in Swarg?)

The performances are uniformly good. SJ Suryah, who sometimes seems to me to be the Thengai Srinivasan’s spiritual successor (come on, isn’t he the only man since Thengai who could pull off Albert Monteiro?), plays his character here at a slightly lower register than we’re used to seeing, and it works. Sundeep Kishen and Kalidas Jayaram create a believable pair of siblings tormented by anger, resentment, then guilt — it is to their credit that they manage these micro-transitions so beautifully that at no point do their characters feel yanked around at the convenience of a plot. Dushara Vijayan as their sister Durga manages to appear both like the MacGuffin her character is written as for much of the running time, and a lot more when the time comes. Selvaraghavan as Raayan’s mentor does his shtick competently, as does Prakash Raj as the cop. And looming over them all is the hulking, brooding presence of Dhanush as the titular character. This is not a performance that demands range but accuracy, and the man provides it.

With Pa Paandi and now Raayan, Dhanush has established himself not as a filmmaker with a unique voice, but as one with a keen eye. His stories have not been surprising, but the films have been littered with details that a lazy writer-director would not have bothered to put in. I for one am waiting to see what he does next.