Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai review: Ram's ideas outshine the telling

Few films would stake their suspense on whether a rat gets back to her pups. Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai does, and for long stretches the gamble pays off. Ram’s latest, shot before Paranthu Po and released more than two years after its Rotterdam premiere, is a bedtime story about a man who cannot die and a man who just wants to get home.

Soori plays a construction worker heading home after eight years in Dubai, to a son he has only seen on video calls. It is Diwali night, and the only other passenger in his compartment is a bearded giant in burlap (Nivin Pauly), asleep across the seats. He claims to be 8,000 years old and sleeps because dreams are the only place he meets the woman he loves (Anjali). Waking him is a mistake. Trying to kill the rat nursing her litter under the seat is a much bigger one.

Ram has always asked his characters to love more widely than is comfortable, and here the circle widens from family to strangers to anything that breathes. The immortal, his most extreme spokesman yet, quotes Tholkappiyam, recalls the Iron Age like last week, and treats the urge to stamp on a pest as a failing humanity has repeated for millennia. Nivin plays him as menace and holy fool, all sudden violence and bruised tenderness, and makes his bond with a CGI rodent believable. Fresh off Mandaadi, Soori is the ideal foil: gifts, sunglasses, a “Sir” every other line, and a selfishness the film eventually traces to a hard childhood instead of simply mocking it.

Where the film tests your goodwill is in the telling. The train arguments circle the same lesson long after it has landed, and the songs keep arriving to drag out moods already established. Then there are the parables. The talking crocodile, the rabbit and the weeping elephant of the immortal’s stories arrive as rough, waxy AI imagery every few minutes. A film pleading with us to look closely at other creatures fills the screen with animals that fall apart the moment you do.

The fix sits in plain sight. Whenever the immortal’s memories leave the compartment, N K Ekhambram’s real forests and the Dhanushkodi shoreline do everything the synthetic interludes cannot. Nivin’s bulk seems to shrink around Anjali, and his longing makes more sense once he stops explaining it. A night-time chase after her bicycle along a beach road, kerosene lamp in hand, is the purest Ram image here. Anjali brings warmth, though the writing keeps her more ideal than person, and the distance returns once the train reclaims the story.

The whole thing is narrated to an orphan boy who wants a home, and that framing is the kindest way to take it. Bedtime stories repeat themselves, and their pictures are sometimes crude. This one is told by someone who believes every word.