Jayaram and Urvashi reunite for Pandiraj's Parimala & Co

Jayaram and Urvashi have not shared a Tamil screen in more than twenty years. Pandiraj puts that right with Parimala & Co, his twelfth film and his first swing at a thriller wrapped in comedy, which the team brought to Chennai this week ahead of a release later this month.

The two were a fixture of family cinema across Tamil and Malayalam through the 1990s, with twenty-five-odd films between them. Urvashi said the script was what pulled them both back: she heard it once and asked to hear it again, and the fact that Jayaram was already on board settled it. He kept his own praise on the writing. The real hero of the film, he said, is the screenplay.

Pandiraj wrote it three years ago. It was Parimala Family first, then briefly Sweet Home, and he only landed on Parimala & Co after putting the options to a vote at home and in the office. The story follows an odd, overstuffed family from Chennai out to Coimbatore and Palakkad, the thriller machinery ticking away under the domestic comedy.

Around the two leads is a deep bench. Santosh Sobhan and Sanjana Krishnamoorthy play one couple, Sandy and Ananthika Sanilkumar another. Yogi Babu, fresh off Thalaivan Thalaivi, takes a full-length part rather than a comic cameo. And Mysskin turns up as a police officer, cast well against his usual register, which several of the others flagged as the surprise of the shoot.

Mysskin returned the compliment to the leads. He talked about wearing out the staircase scene from Michael Madana Kamarajan, Kamal Haasan opposite Urvashi, as the thing that taught him what screen acting was, and called sharing a frame with her and Jayaram the reason he acts at all.

Not all of it was comfortable. Pandiraj shot most of the film inside one small house, sealed up for continuous day-and-night scenes, and the lack of air left most of the unit with viral fever and a cough by the end. Urvashi came back to set the day after a personal loss to finish her portions, comedy scenes included.

Lyca Productions, with Tamilkumaran Productions and Pandiraj’s own Pasanga Productions, is behind the film. George C. Williams shot it, and the score is by Foxn, a debut composer Pandiraj has taken to calling his next Anirudh. Parimala & Co reaches theatres this May.