Cold Call puts four sales reps and four newcomers in theatres on September 18

Cold Call is about the people on the other end of the line. Four friends work as sales representatives, and Thambidurai, who wrote and directed, has built the film out of the ordinary days of that job, the pitches, the rejections, the romances squeezed in around targets, and played it as comedy. His pitch for it is generational: sales reps are everywhere in this society, he says, and the Gen Z audience in particular will recognise itself on screen. The film opens in theatres worldwide on September 18.

The four leads are all new to the screen: Siddu Moolimani, Sri Vaishnav, Santhosh S.A. and Krishna Vijay Chandran. Around them are V. Srikanth, Balaji Rajasekar, Amitha Ranganatha, Nisha Hegde and Keerthana. The poster does a fair amount of the storytelling on its own, four young men in office shirts and lanyards draped over a rooftop ledge under a billboard, one of them mid-selfie, one clutching the shoulder bag that is the uniform of the trade.

Pranav Giridharan’s songs have been arriving for a while through Saregama: Ora Kannu, Pani Kaatrin sung by Sai Vignesh, and Thaakurom Thookurom with the El Fe’ Choir, with lyrics by Pa. Aravindhan and Armious. G.N. Saravanan shoots, Suresh Arumugam edits and Jaguar Sannappa stages the stunts, of which a sales comedy presumably needs a few. Keshava Murthy produces under Walkthrough Entertainment.

The title teaser has been out for some time and set the tone: bright, quick and more interested in the friends than in any plot. Debut casts have a long record of being given a chance by Tamil audiences, which is the bet here, and the runtime promise is a modest one, two hours of four friends trying to close. September 18 is the date.