Ananthan Kaadu review: great frames, familiar fight

Some films spend their best ideas in the first hour and then live off the credit for two more. Ananthan Kaadu is one of them. Jiyen Krishnakumar’s second feature, nine years after Tiyaan, arrives with real visual ambition and a Murali Gopy screenplay that keeps promising something denser than the revenge story it eventually settles into.

The setting does a lot of the heavy lifting. We are in Thiruvananthapuram across the late 1980s and early 90s, back when the city still answered to an older name, the forest of Anantha. Vetrivel Kumaran (Arya) is a Sri Lankan Tamil dropped into a Malayalam story who washes up in Kerala after losing his family to the civil war, and falls in with a band of musician-mercenaries who run an orchestra by day and settle scores by night. Their patch of the city is politically spoken for, which is how Vetri gets pulled into the schemes of gangsters and power brokers who were never going to protect men like him.

When the film is staging, it is genuinely good. A night-time massacre on Sri Lankan soil, a home invasion that plays out while a festival blazes on outside, a college brawl: these early set pieces carry a graphic-novel charge, and S. Yuva’s camera finds both the grime and the colour of the period. The production design is meticulous, the railway-station stretch near the climax especially. You can feel Krishnakumar reaching for the muscular old-school energy of the I.V. Sasi and Shaji Kailas school, and often getting there.

The trouble starts once the plot has to carry the weight. Murali Gopy the writer keeps reaching for his vocabulary instead of his structure, and the characters begin speaking in rhyming, self-consciously literary lines that announce their own cleverness rather than earn it. The revenge engine is a familiar one, the present-day framing tips the ending far too early, and the back half mistakes more violence for more tension. By the final act the inventiveness has drained away, and what is left feels like a 1990s potboiler that time-travelled to 2026.

Indrans, in a rare grim register, walks off with Krishnankutty.

It is the actors who keep it upright. Indrans, in a rare grim register, takes the film’s best lines and the loudest applause in the room. Murali Gopy gives Thankaraj a grounded, lived-in weight. Vijayaraghavan brings the right oily authority as the Chief Minister with a buried past. The catch is Arya: top-billed yet oddly sidelined, handed one solid karate sequence and not much personality beyond his fists. A deep cross-industry ensemble (Nikhila Vimal, Dev Mohan, Regina Cassandra, Sunil, Santhy Balachandran) drifts in and out in two- and three-scene parcels, most of them underused. B. Ajaneesh Loknath’s score, his Malayalam debut after Kantara, keeps the mood charged even when the writing sags.

Ananthan Kaadu is sincere, handsomely made, and never less than watchable. It just never finds a story worthy of its own craft. 3.25/5.