Jana Nayagan's Adiye En Poonthene is Vijay saying goodbye as a father

The song Vijay chose to release six days before his final film is not a mass number and not a romance. Adiye En Poonthene is a father watching his daughter grow up, and given who is singing goodbye here, that choice is the whole point.

The lyrical video runs two minutes and two seconds, built from film stills that follow Mamitha Baiju’s character from a small girl into a teenager and then a young woman, with Vijay’s character beside her at every stage. Anirudh Ravichander composed it and sings it himself, a melancholic line rather than a hook, with lyrics by Karthik Netha.

It lands differently because of what Jana Nayagan is. This is Vijay’s 69th film and his last, the goodbye before he governs full time. He is not a star flirting with politics from a safe distance any more. He won the 2026 Tamil Nadu election and took oath as Chief Minister in May. So a song about a man raising a girl to be braver than she thinks she can be, released as his parting shot, reads as a man handing something over rather than holding on.

The character carries the same double meaning the whole film does. Vijay plays Thalapathy Vetri Kondan, a former official who adopts a young girl named Viji and pushes her toward the forces even though she is frightened of violence. The name is not a coincidence. Vetri Kondan’s initials are TVK, the same as Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, the party he now runs. The film keeps blurring the line between the roles until you cannot tell where the send-off to the actor ends and the launch of the politician begins.

Getting here took a while. Jana Nayagan sat through a certification tangle and a pre-release leak that put the print online before a single ticket had been sold, and it eventually cleared the board with an A. Directed by H Vinoth and produced by KVN Productions, it has Pooja Hegde and Mamitha Baiju as the female leads and Bobby Deol as the villain, with Gautham Vasudev Menon, Prakash Raj, Narain and Priyamani filling out the cast.

For a career that made its name on whistling-in-the-aisles entrances, ending on a lullaby is a strange, deliberate note. Jana Nayagan opens July 23.