OM trailer: Dhanush infiltrates the red sandalwood trade

The OM trailer has landed a week before release, and it finally explains the two letters. O.M stands for Operation Mole, a joint police mission against the red sandalwood smuggling network in Andhra Pradesh’s Seshachalam forests, and Dhanush is the mole. Rajkumar Periasamy’s full title, OM: Chapter 1, Udhiram: The Blood Wood, now reads less like a riddle and more like a case file.

The cut runs just over three minutes and opens on a line that sets the terms: “Some of these things actually happened.” A title card places the story between two temple towns. From there it moves into the forest, the cutting crews and the lorries stacked with red logs, the trade that has pulled thousands of labourers from northern Tamil Nadu into dangerous work in those hills for decades.

Dhanush plays a Tamil Nadu officer who is put through a training camp and then sent in as a woodcutter, working alongside the smugglers until they trust him. The trailer is careful about how much it gives away. Several shots have him brawling with policemen rather than with the gang, and the cut never settles how deep the cover runs or whether it holds.

Sai Pallavi’s Nithya Reddy runs Operation Mole, the officer at the top of the chain while Dhanush works the bottom of it. Dhanush has already said the part was anything but easy for her and the trailer keeps her at the centre of the investigation.

The biggest reveal is Mammootty. The trailer puts him behind a podium with both arms raised, then walking through a cheering street crowd, a politician who seems to control the trade without ever touching a log. It is his first film with Dhanush, and the poster that heads the trailer sells exactly that: two men in matching jet seats, red on one side, gold on the other.

Sreeleela plays Dhanush’s wife, glimpsed in a wedding sequence and at home, and Naseeruddin Shah turns up briefly. Renu Desai’s part still goes unexplained. Sai Abhyankkar scores, Ezhil Arasu K shoots and R Kalaivanan edits, with action by Yannick Ben and Kecha Khamphakdee. Dhanush produces with Shraddha Agrawal and Azmat Jagmag under Wunderbar Films and RTake Studios.

Rajkumar has said the story’s emotional root is a 30-second video from 2014 of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl at a ceremony, an image that stayed with him for more than a decade. The film is planned as the first of two parts.

OM was first set for October 16. Dhanush moved it out of the way of Rajinikanth’s Jailer 2, which opened a day earlier, and then kept clear of Diwali and Suriya’s Scene. At the audio launch, he called it a film with five heroes. It opens worldwide on November 20 in Tamil, with Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam and Kannada versions, the same day as Keerthy Suresh’s Sathyavan Savithiri.