Movie Review: Kuttrame Thandanai (Tamil)

"Edhu thevayo adhu thaan dharmam," says a character at one point to Ravi (played very effectively by Vidharth), a credit card collection agent suffering from tunnel vision. And what he sees and experiences is what we see too; nothing more, nothing less. And from what we see, Ravi's is not so much a life as it's a daily grind for survival, that of a man barely making ends meet whose desperation to get his eye treated drives him over the edge, trapping him in a vicious cycle of wrongdoings. Running a lean 93 minutes, director M. Manikandan steers clear of melodrama and undue sermonising, all the while wasting no time setting the dark tone of loneliness and despair (aided by Ilaiyaraaja's background score) even as the situations take a turn for the worse. Equally interesting is the way how every single character in the story pay for their crimes, including Ravi, who, as unrepentant as he is about what he has done, eventually breaks down at having learned the real truth about his vision. After all kuttrame thandanai (read: a crime in any form is a punishment in itself). A brooding, compulsive watch!