Arya Plays a Tamil Man Inside a Malayalam Story in Ananthan Kaadu

Arya has drifted in and out of Malayalam cinema in cameos and side parts, but Ananthan Kaadu is the film that hands him the whole frame. It is his first full-fledged lead in Mollywood, and the way the role is built is the interesting part: he plays Vetri, a Tamil-speaking man who crosses from Tamil Nadu into Thiruvananthapuram, a character whose language sets him slightly apart from the world he walks into. Speaking at the Tamil pre-release event in Chennai, Arya called Murali Gopy’s script brilliant and pointed to the split geography that drives it, part of the story unfolding in Thiruvananthapuram and part in Tamil Nadu.

That border is the film’s whole subject. Ananthan Kaadu is a political action thriller set along the Thiruvananthapuram-Kanyakumari frontier in the late 1980s and early 1990s, digging into the lives, struggles and politics of the people who live where the two states rub against each other. Murali Gopy, one of Malayalam cinema’s most respected writers, scripts it and also appears in the cast, and director Jiyen Krishnakumar stages it as a period piece thick with the era’s tensions over power and survival.

The bilingual is being handled with some care for both audiences. The Tamil lines in the Malayalam version stay as they are, while the Malayalam dialogue in the Tamil cut has been dubbed into Tamil, so neither side watches a film that feels translated against the grain. Around Arya, the ensemble runs deep, with veteran Indrans, Sunil, Regina Cassandra and Nikhila Vimal among the names filling out the border’s cast of characters.

Behind the camera, the film is shot by S Yuva and scored by B Ajaneesh Loknath, whose music has carried several recent Kannada and pan-South hits. It is produced by S Vinod Kumar under Mini Studio and by Arya under his own The Show People banner, with Gokulam Gopalan presenting. Arya’s run continues alongside his Tamil slate, including the spy thriller Mr X. Ananthan Kaadu reaches theatres on June 25, and for Arya it is less a guest appearance than a claim staked: a Tamil actor leading a Malayalam film about the line where the two worlds meet.