It is a familiar story — you are a director with a distinctive vision; you make a distinctive film; a superstar picks you up; you make a film for them, around them; you dissolve that distinction. Many filmmakers keep tussling their auteurial instincts with audience intrigue that demands a level of flattening fanfare. Some, like Karthik Subbaraj, lose it, and need to rein in and recalibrate to find their voice again. Others, like Pa Ranjith, use the stardom to platform their politics, exploding Dalit cinema, even as it chips away at their storytelling. Yet others, like Lokesh Kanagaraj, keep playing hide-and-seek with their own instincts.
Nelson, for some reason, has held onto what makes him an auteur, and working with stars like Sivakarthikeyan in Doctor (2021), Vijay in Beast (2022), and Rajinikanth in Jailer (2023) has sharpened his sensibilities as a filmmaker.
You can watch a scene from one of his films and know, instinctively, this is his. It could be the negative space he leaves around characters while framing them; the clean symmetry of the image. It could be the vivid wash of colour that coats every scene of Jailer, surfaces as though secreting colour and heat, the verdant banana leaves and the baby blue skies. It could also be the use of humour, situational and slapstick, deadpan and dross, that renders everything — rape, kidnapping, human trafficking, grief, PTSD, terrorism — without tension. As opposed to the “comedy track” in Tamil cinema, which recedes when the film’s stakes become more serious or poignant, comedy in Nelson’ films is omnipresent, making it all feel like a ‘Jolly O Gymkhana’.
Humour is that which reminds us that there will be light at the end of this dark, circuitous tunnel. To have it as a constant, ringing presence — with his cast of comedians like Yogi Babu, Redin Kingsley, VTV Ganesh, and Shiva Aravind in almost all his films — is to be constantly reminded that there is nothing to worry about. No tension, no friction. Nelson makes his films distinctive by turning them inside out.
For example, the pre-interval stretch of gore in Nelson’s Jailer (2023) — his fourth and most successful film, starring Rajinikanth — is, perhaps, one of the most distinctive, auteurial touches in commercial Tamil cinema. Through the first half, Muthuvel Pandian (Rajinikanth), a retired jailer, has been on the hunt, exacting vengeance from those who murdered his son, bodies slashed, beheaded, pierced, and left to rot. This violence is not the usual limb-thumping, arm-twisting action montage. It is quick and ends as soon as it begins. All joy is in the face of Rajinikanth, swollen with satisfaction, slow-motion close-ups.
To avenge this bloodbath, however, the villain pours goons onto Muthuvel’s home — with his wife, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Muthuvel is unfazed. He brings his wife and daughter-in-law to sit at the dining table, opposite him, and tells them not to move an inch. Lightning keeps flaring in the skies outside. Otherwise caring, honest to a fault, and god-fearing, the two women have never seen this man’s violent streak — it is not violent as much as psychopathic, possessing none of the strain, remorse, or doubt in violence. It is a radical clarity that violence should take place, simply because it is necessary. He slashes bodies the way people cut fruit. The goons keep flooding into the home, and they keep falling like flies. At one point, a body, bleeding, slumps onto the table and rolls onto the women’s laps. They scream. Muthuvel smirks, “Just push it.”
It is a comic punchline that leeches the scene’s tension. Nelson did the same in Doctor, where Sivakarthikeyan’s character helps a family track down their kidnapped young girl, who is being trafficked. In a pre-interval scene of comic violence in a metro, against twin villains, the whole family take a go at bloodshed, including the house help, whose hair is used to hilarious effect. Amidst all the gags and twisty manoeuvres, the thing at the centre of the film is lost — a girl trafficked.
You would never know that these families are grieving. Or worried. Or angry. What is, instead, foregrounded is their shock — a comic shock — at all the bodies being flung in their direction.
Nelson constantly gambles with the tone of his film. “Black comedy” is often used to describe his movies, because of the proximity of humour to troubling issues, but “quirky” might be more like it. He never has fun with the issue itself — that would be black comedy. Instead, he filigrees the issue with bumbling characters and ridiculous jokes that render it frictionless. It is why his films are distinctive. It can also be why his films lack a solidity — they slide through, their stakes watered down by all the shindigs.
Right after the gangster threatens Muthuvel that his grandson will be lopped off piece by piece, the gangster and his entourage dance to ‘Taal Se Taal’, while Muthuvel is sitting, contemplating his next steps. Right after Muthivel is told by the gangster that his son he has presumed to be dead is, indeed, alive, the gangsters break into a dance to ‘Kannodu Kanbathellam’. He is in shock while the gangsters all around him dance. Nelson has created an impenetrable skein of humour that makes it impossible to reach his paternal feelings.
What is this scene supposed to secrete? Any lingering threat or doom has been scooped out by the silliness. Most of Beast is a chamber drama set in a mall held hostage by terrorists without an ounce of anxiety. It is all underwear jokes, romantic jealousy, and bumbling politicians.
Scenes dangle, their affect unsure. Nelson has tried to make his films so unpredictable, trying to go against type, so sure of what we should not feel, that it forgets to ask — what should we feel.
Take Kokila (Nayanthara) in Kolamavu Kokila, Nelson’s electric debut, about her having to scramble for funds for her mother’s cancer treatment, getting snagged in a cocaine ring. In a scene, she might be getting raped and the rapist, a man in a neck brace, tells her, “Rape ellam panna mudiyathu. Spinal chord… total damage… Nee konja cooperate panni paatu panniko.” (I won’t be able to rape you. My spinal chord is totally damaged. So you must cooperate and do the needful.) Later, again when Kokila is to be raped, she stops the guy, and tells her that she wants her family — waiting outside — to be let into the room, because she is worried about their safety. (All of this has a sheen of comedy, mind you. None of the jokes are about rape, per se, but about the situation in which the rape might be taking place.) The rapist complies. Together, the family kills the man, the cancer-ridden mother whacking the man on his head with a hammer.
This tonal scramble can be testing, for no scene carries the emotional weight that it is supposed to. The silliness can feel like buffonery, stretching the film’s lapsed attention span. How does one sit through the almost-three hours of frictionless storytelling?
I suppose, it is because even as Nelson is an unserious filmmaker, he is also an unserious stylist. He is able to establish the presence of characters, such that even a glimmer of something that haunts them, pain and fear, can prick the surface of the film, before receding, just as quickly. To be clear, they are still shells of characters — and I maintain that to be a Nelson hero/ine is to be mildly psychopathic, and certainly sociopathic, given it requires you to use humour to deadpan through moral crises where murders become shrugging, incidental details. But something shimmers, once in a while, like turning a glittering surface towards the sun.
There is also something arresting about his visual control, something inherently funny about these frames, all that negative space making characters look like floating heads, and those canted angles that sometimes, as in Doctor, enhances the strangeness, but sometimes, as in Jailer, can feel at odds with the scene. When the family gets news that Muthuvel’s son might be dead, the camera is placed between a garland hanging from a portrait above the door frame.
Even the way conversations are framed with the typical over-the-shoulder, is, in Nelson’s cinema, grist for humour. In Beast, as in Doctor, the two people having conversations are of vastly different heights, so the camera is peering down or peeking up from the shoulder. (Nelson keeps casting vertically challenged people. In Beast, Umar Farooq, the Pakistani terrorist, a Bin Laden-like character, has been cast as a short, pudgy man, so when he runs, it looks like he is waddling. The threat has been defanged.)
Just like Kanagaraj brought into Tamil cinema a slickness of action and pace, and just like Subbaraj brought into Tamil cinema a gorgeous, unwieldy form, Nelson brought into it, his clean, unserious shrug of cinema.
He won’t give big entrances to his heroes — the low-key entrance of Vijay in Beast in a market in Kashmir, buying balloons, or that of Rajinikanth opening the door of the prayer room, searching for his grandson, to help him shoot his vlog. He doesn’t mind discarding the “love track” or dangling them as irrelevant asides. He wants to tell a simple story by going against type, and pins it down with a visual clarity and explodes it with comedy, both shrieking and deadpan, until the film turns dizzy, spinning, wilding, thumping.