Many of the Indian releases that pivoted to streaming over the past 18 months have deserved burial-by-algorithm, if I’m being honest. One that doesn’t is the Tamil melodrama Karnan, an exceptionally vivid spot of latter-day myth-making. You wonder whether writer-director Mari Selvaraj pitched it as “what if Baahubali” – the two-part SS Rajamouli epic that redrew the horizons of Indian commercial cinema back in 2015 – “but in the here-and-now?”. Enter our eponymous young hero (local megastar Dhanush), introduced completing a ritual that involves leaping off a rock overhanging a pool and, while still in mid-air, bisecting vermillion-daubed fish with a flashing blade. Lakes, swords: British viewers may be reminded of Camelot. Here’s another knight in search of a worthy cause.
Yet the surprise Selvaraj has for us – one of the biggest curveballs in any movie released this past year – is that this cause should be a fully integrated public transit system. This is a tale of two villages, one of which (Karnan’s native Podiyankulam) is dirt-poor, the other (neighbouring Melur) rich enough to afford its own bus stop. When the residents of Podiyankulam hike to Melur to catch the bus, they’re regarded with suspicion and sometimes outright contempt as outsiders taking up valuable space – a source of ongoing tension between the two communities. Selvaraj has taken us somewhere very specific to tell a story that is broadly universal: a story about tribalism, and how it’s now often tied up with issues of free movement.
