At Train's launch, Ram counts what Mysskin's six years cost

Handed the microphone at his friend’s teaser launch, Ram could have talked about the film. He talked about the six years instead.

The occasion was the launch of Train, Mysskin’s first release since Psycho in 2020, with Vijay Sethupathi in the lead and Shruti Haasan, Nassar, Naren and K.S. Ravikumar filling out the cast. Ram walked to the podium and did the arithmetic out loud. Six years since Psycho’s audio launch. In that window Mysskin has finished two films, Pisaasu 2 and Train, with a third stalled somewhere in the middle. And to move a single one of them from script to screen, Ram said, his friend absorbed a run of betrayals, disappointments, false accusations and humiliations that would have finished most people.

“Any normal person would have disappeared after facing so much pain at once,” Ram said. That Mysskin instead pushed it all aside with his left hand and stood up straight, Ram argued, comes down to one stubborn thing: an unshakeable faith in people. Even after all the wounds, he keeps loving them, and that is what has kept him alive in cinema. The room answered with the loudest applause of the evening.

From there Ram made the case for why Mysskin matters. Call him the father of the Tamil thriller and you would not be exaggerating, he said; outside Nandalala, almost the entire filmography sits in that genre. But Ram’s point was about method, not tally. Reaching for Khalil Gibran’s idea that the murdered share guilt in their own murder and the robbed in their own theft, he described a filmmaker who refuses to treat crime as entertainment. Mysskin follows the reasoning behind the criminal until the audience is made to feel something close to mercy for the person in the dock.

Then the reason the whole exercise carries weight: this is Mysskin’s first film with Vijay Sethupathi. Ram traced the actor’s twin instincts, the mainstream comedy that carried Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom and Naanum Rowdy Dhaan, and the darker register of Pizza and Maharaja, and framed Train as the meeting point where a thriller obsessive finally gets to direct one of the industry’s most elastic leads. Director Sasi, speaking after him, admitted his curiosity ran the same way, wanting to see how Mysskin would draw a performance out of an actor like Sethupathi. Sasi credited producer Dhanu with keeping an old promise to make a film with Mysskin, and pointed to the combination of Mysskin’s score and Sethupathi’s presence as the source of the expectation now stacked on the film.

None of that changes the fact that Train has to open before any of it is proven. But for one night the marketing beat gave way to something rawer: a director standing up to tell a full house exactly what it had cost his friend to still be here. Mysskin’s next crime thriller is already lined up behind this one.