Mandaadi trailer: Soori's boat racer comes home to take the sea back from Suhas

Mandaadi has a trailer, and what it sells is a grudge on water. Soori plays Muthukaali, a sailboat racer who once ruled the sport along the fishing coast and then walked away from it, and from his village, for reasons the trailer keeps to itself. He comes back to find the racing in the hands of Sattai Puli, a troublemaker played by Suhas, and takes charge of a new crew to beat him. The two men squabble over sails, over a storm, over who counts for what in the village; and the trailer is clear that the rivalry is going to cost them at home as much as on the water, with a father-son thread running underneath the racing.

That is the whole pitch, and it is a plain one: a fallen champion coaching a fresh team against the outfit that replaced him. What the trailer adds is how Soori looks doing it. The beard, the leaner frame, the racing jersey; it is a physical rebuild of the man, and the confrontations with Suhas carry the character’s weight without a trace of the comic timing Soori spent fifteen years on. Suhas, known for his Telugu work, is making his Tamil debut here, and Soori has already said what the casting is banking on: a face that reads innocent from one side and menacing from the other.

The racing and storm footage is the thing the trailer was built to show off, and it did not come cheap. Three quarters of Mandaadi was shot fifteen to twenty kilometres out at sea, on wind-powered boats with no motors and cameras rigged to the hulls, and Soori finished the last stretch of it with a fractured leg, arriving on set in a wheelchair. The title itself is the word for the man who reads currents, wind and swell and leads a sailboat crew, which is the job Muthukaali is trying to earn back.

G.V. Prakash Kumar’s songs have been out for weeks: Mandaadi Mandaadi, the title track Soori dances in, along with Usure Neethaan Pulla and Oli Vattam, with lyrics by Pa Vijay, Jayashree Mathimaran and Vaaheesan Rasaiya. S.R. Kathir shot the film, Pradeep E. Ragav edited it, D.R.K. Kiran handled production design, and Peter Hein, Dhilip Subbarayan and Mahesh Mathew staged the action. Mathimaran Pugazhendhi wrote and directed, with Elred Kumar producing for RS Infotainment and sharing the writing credit with R. Mohanavasanthan and Thiral Sankar; Vetrimaaran is creative producer. Sathyaraj, Mahima Nambiar, Mithun Jai Shankar, Ravindra Vijay and Bala Saravanan fill out the cast.

For Soori this is the next step in a run of lead roles that began with Viduthalai and carried through Garudan, Kottukkaali and Maaman. Those were rural dramas built on performance. Mandaadi, announced in April last year as a sports action film set on the Ramanathapuram and Tuticorin coast, is the first of them designed as spectacle, and it is being released to match: Mandaadi opens worldwide on September 10, including IMAX and PXL screens.