A Guide to Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Mad Mass Universe: From 'Kaithi' and 'Master' to 'Vikram' and 'Coolie'

Lokesh Kanagaraj has swiftly become the lead sculptor of Tamil mass heroism — first Karthi in Kaithi (2019); then Vijay in Master (2021), and later, Leo (2023); followed by Kamal Haasan in Vikram (2022); and now, with Coolie (2025), Rajinikanth. He is among the new breed of “star directors”, whose name alone is enough to anchor projects, tickling excitement among distributors and the audience. It is the kind of power only star-actors possess, for Kanagaraj understands the demands made on oversized masculinity — to be violent and vengeful when need be, playful and footloose when need be, but ultimately, to be tied down and pushed along by love.

Stylised car chases at night, quick, brutal action set pieces often lit only by headlamps, memorable etchings of bumbling side characters who slip into heroism, and women written with the remaining, paltry handfuls of loam, his cinema, from his feature film debut Maanagaram (2017) has had a force of velocity that has quickly turned his filmmaking into a genre, and this genre into a universe — the Lokesh Cinematic Universe (LCU).

Side characters from one film pop up in others, like Napoleon (George Maryan), a police officer from Trichy from Kaithi shows up in Himachal Pradesh in Leo. Or Anbu (Arjun Das) and Adaikalam (Harish Uthaman), gangsters who are holding fort in Kaithi, reporting to a larger force in Vikram. This is how Kanagaraj describes the LCU: “an action-packed universe whose heroes,” — Dilli (Karthi), Parthiban (Vijay), and Vikram (Kamal Haasan) — “are loud about their message towards a drug-free society.”

With the introduction of mass heroes like Vijay and orchestral swells of composer Anirudh Ravichander, Kanagaraj’s canvas exploded. His first two films — Maanagaram and Kaithi — were set over the course of a night. Their music was relegated to the background, to montage, at best. That immediacy and intimacy got lost in his later films, which revel in the possibilities that larger timelines, stars, and budgets can allow.

Here is a guide through Kanagaraj’s filmography — where to begin, where to pause and ponder, and what to skip.

Play: Kaithi and Master

Nine hundred kilograms of cocaine worth ₹840 crores is missing. The mafia are in pursuit of it; the police are trying to keep it hidden. A whole police battalion has been drugged and needs to be carted off to a hospital before this drug mafia slashes them dead. Simultaneously, a police station is going to be attacked by the mafia, manned only by some engineering students and a rookie cop. In the midst of these two threads of plot, an ex-convict, Dilli (Karthi), will have to drive the truck with drugged officers to the hospital, and make it in time for meeting his daughter — who has never met him before — in the morning. Dilli is a character who comes out of nowhere, shakes things up, and saves the night.

With Kaithi, Kanagaraj establishes himself as the master of the inter-cut, splicing his story in ways that don’t feel fragmented, but sedimented. (Editor Philomin Raj has been his collaborator throughout.) When he moves to cleaner, more linear stories — Master, then, Leo, both with Vijay — along with the confected, clever chaos, something vital to Kanagaraj’s filmography gets leeched out.

The stakes are laid out clearly from the get-go here, which makes the film thrive on the tension it builds and releases, in a beautiful choreography of violence — because that is what action is to Kanagaraj, an elaborate choreography of thrashed limbs. He is interested more in the physical than the psychological.

Even though with his next film, Master, he forcefully attempts to provide a backstory to its villain — the film, in fact, begins with it — explaining how some people are pushed into villainy, these constructions feel like ornamental filigree, not character truths. You never see the villain as anything but evil. What is most exciting about Kanagaraj’s movies, what drives his characters, is never the reasons for violence, but violence itself. It is in the act of smashing that these people assert their full presence. Motivation is a formality.

Next: Vikram

With Vikram and later, Leo, Kanagaraj chanced upon a new kind of structure — where the film clarifies its purpose only around the interval; the first half being sort of a warm-up, a dress rehearsal, for what is to come. With Vikram, Kanagaraj begins setting up his LCU, where now the contained world of Kaithi is cocooned in a larger world. If Kaithi planted the seed, Vikram is the long and winding sprouting of the LCU.

Kanagaraj, a Kamal Haasan fanboy, has serviced for him a fan-vehicle, that insists on his moral and physical depravity for the first hour, only to reverse it pre-interval, and set the chase rolling. Vikram, a former Black-Ops commander — men who live and die in the shadows — is amassing his team to take down a drug syndicate. One of the men who gets recruited is the one who is investigating him, Agent Amar (Fahadh Faasil). Amar’s investigation into Vikram is staged as that ultimate moment in art — the moment of ‘recognition’, when you turn towards knowing someone for who they are and what they stand for.

Vikram takes what we know of Kanagaraj’s filmography and showcases them at its finest — the pre-interval spillage of violence, side characters like Agent Tina who through the razor-clean violence in a sari assert their character’s clarity of thought, and the ability to showcase a hero’s wounds as his crowning jewel. And, ultimately, a cameo so dazzling it shifts the gravity of the film’s heroism — a cameo that will, hopefully, become its own film.

Pause: Maanagaram

Set in Chennai, Maanagaram is a city film — as in a film that captures what a city is going through at a certain period, cataloguing how the city changes people, how the people elbow their way into making the prickly city their possible home. It is almost ethnographic in its gaze of the air-conditioned world of BPOs, the stage for a certain kind of sterile ambition, which is undone by the streets, and its misplaced, tragi-comic logic.

In the office, your identity is tied to your certificates, pinned down by government IDs. On the street, it is what you wear, or sometimes, just your name. The street thugs keep nabbing the wrong person — three men wear the same shirt, and the wrong one is pulped; many kids have the same name, and the wrong one is kidnapped. A comedy of errors blurs these disparate worlds — the gangsters are listening to songs from Moondru Mugam (1982) on the radio; the BPO girls are watching “Kar Gayi Chhul” on television, Shah Rukh Khan and Sonakshi Sinha are on their moodboards. Kanagaraj’s provocation is that they apply pressure on each other. You cannot build a sealed world in a city whose playground is the border.

Skip: Leo

Set in the snowy town of Theog in Himachal Pradesh, Leo is Kanagaraj’s most brutal film — here, the impact and effect of a violent gesture, say a punch of a wrist or a stab of a knife, takes place in the same shot, as opposed to the cut, which softens the violence of these moments. A tissue holder being slammed against an open mouth, a tongue that falls from a chin being punched from below — these are tortured but winking images of violence.

In Maanagaram, for example, Kanagaraj would often keep the presence of a face next to a blade, only to cut away, and let the impact simmer in our minds — there was always a cut between a heavy hit, and its heavier recoil. The metal blade of a spade splices a finger against a wall, but there is a blur in the image.

This would be Kanagaraj’s first collaboration with cinematographer Manoj Paramahamsa, whose camera movement is fluid and flying, whose serpentine swaying almost gives this film a kinesthetic polish that his previous films lacked — that swooping camera flying over a factory being burned down in the middle of a brawl alone is worth the price of entry.

But ultimately, the film falls on the shoulders of not its style, but its story — here, so thin it is parodic. Antony Das (Sanjay Dutt) comes to Theog to confront Parthiban (Vijay), insisting that Parthiban is actually his son Leo. Parthiban says no. Antony says yes — and so, the film’s second hour ricochets between one’s insistence and the other’s rejection. This frustrating framework keeps getting renewed with each fresh bout of violence; here, we wonder if it is not just motivation, but story, too, that has become a formality.

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