Recommended
Visaranai is beautifully filmed, though there isn’t much room for beauty. The frames appear to have been snatched from the back alleys of life. The verité illusion is aided by the utterly lifelike performances—even if the word “performance” seems wrong. No one seems to be acting. Dinesh, especially, does extraordinarily physical things—watch him at the end, whimpering like a cornered animal. At this point, he’s knee-deep in a morass—it’s another symbolic touch. Muthuvel is in the morass too. We’re all stuck in shit. The film’s early portions are set in places we identify with the System (the police station, the court), and by the end, the action opens out to a middle-class neighbourhood, the kind of place we live in. That’s the chilling takeaway. There’s no escaping the System. It’s all around us.