Well before director Dhanush presents us the ten-headed Raavana image of Raayan (played by Dhanush himself), there is plenty of reason to process the protagonist as a reimagination of the demon-god. He has got a sister he dotes on, a feisty sister who is quite capable of fighting her battles. He has got a couple of brothers, one of who seems more noble than the other, one of who feels more traitorous than the other. Raayan and co. feel like a family of asuras, a clan whose bloodline seems prone to violence, each of them being naturally gifted at mayhem-making. Perhaps that’s why towards the end, a mother hands over a baby, saying, “Unga raththam enakku vendaam.” Perhaps the idea for the story itself began with a what if. What if we threw a family of asuras into present-day civilisation? What if we threw them into a mix of poverty, social neglect and lawlessness?

Director: Dhanush

Cast: Dhanush, SJ Suryah, Sundeep Kishan, Kalidas Jayaram, Selvaraghavan, Prakash Raj, Dushara Vijayan

The parents of Raayan and siblings step out, never to return. In suffering, Raayan turns to a deity-figure, as you’d expect, but then, when has God, in our mythology, taken the side of asuras? For that reason, he is the first to get murdered here. Someone quips, “Poojari, la… Adhaan kadavul kitta poitaaru.” From then on, it’s a quest for survival for the Raayan family. Unlike Kokki Kumar, who stood for the ‘survival of the fittest’, Raayan’s idea of survival isn’t predicated on climbing up the ladder of ambition. He’s smarter; he’s more grounded. He prefers to keep his head down and keep his family together, and as we see his siblings oriented towards specific goals (education for Muthu, marriage for Durga), if you squinted, you could maybe even see a bit of Baasha in Raayan. At one point, he frightens a man into submission, and a cop asks, “Enna sonninga?” I half-expected him to say, “Unmaya sonnen.” But Raayan says, “Kenji ketten sir.” It’s one of many places in Raayan where director Dhanush shows that his goal isn’t to capitalise on easy mass-ification of his character.

Raayan is a fascinating character—and is likened to a lion in the film. Much like the animal, he kills with his ‘claw’—and it leads to some imaginative fight scenes. Much like a lion, he operates in solitude; he’s quiet with his kills, and he has limitless patience when his pride of siblings bother him. Dhanush plays him magnificently. When he willingly walks into the lair of wolves (as he goes to meet SJ Suryah’s Sethu), he struts every bit like a lion. When he sizes up his prey, his eyes brim with menace and bloodlust.

Through Raayan and Durga, director Dhanush presents the beauty of a selfless relationship where one never lets the other down. Isn’t that the stuff of poetry—to find someone who is ready to sacrifice themselves for you, someone for whom you’d willingly sacrifice yourself? Such a relationship fights the selfishness encoded into our biological being—and yet, every now and then, a special love emerges that shatters primal survival instincts. Raayan and Durga can forgive the harm done to themselves, but when it's done to the other… There’s a lovely scene where they even verbalise this sentiment.

If Dhanush so chose, he could have treated Raayan as a film with elevation moment after elevation moment, set-piece after set-piece, but he doesn’t. He observes fascinating restraint and steps into the action zone quite carefully each time. Around the interval point, as Raayan is mopping up the henchmen of a gangster leader (Saravanan), we don’t see that happening. We only see the boss, seated in a chair, ruing his decision-making (the Baasha line came to me: “Saththam kekkumbodhe nenachen, nee mudichiruppanu.”). Later on, as Raayan is prowling the streets and again, eliminating his foes, we don’t see it occurring from his perspective. In another moment, the police chief (Prakash Raj) speaks about his reason for wanting to clean up the neighbourhood of its gangsters. Eventually, when Raayan presents his brand of justice to SJ Suryah’s Sethu, it got me thinking about the police chief’s dad being burnt alive many years ago—and the stray comment from Durai about an old problem. It’s not a film that’s trying to handhold you through its details. It’s not a film that’s trying to provide you easy action entertainment either—and I feel fondly about Raayan for these reasons.

When the fighting portions do come, they do with great attention paid to how the scenes are lit, how the stunts are choreographed, and how the music is used. AR Rahman is wonderful with how he plays around with percussion. Muthu’s fighting is accompanied by some urgent beats, but when the Raayan trio storm in—like trained assassins in some Tarantino film—the composer opts for ominous, dull thumps. Pay attention to Rahman’s score during that portion when Durga toils to save Raayan; pay attention to how Dhanush ensures that Dushara doesn’t feel physically inferior. It’s all evidence that for director Dhanush, actor Dhanush is a performer, not a star. That’s why he ensures that Dushara gets such an impressive fight scene, in which she uses objects around her to cause such destruction. This is a far cry from women in such cinema who are mostly relegated to being victims. Durga, like the goddess she’s named after, is an avenging angel who knows no forgiveness. Seeing the urgency and chaos in that hospital fight scene, I’d happily watch a whole film in which Durga channels her inner Beatrix Kiddo and moves from one kill to another.

There are issues too in Raayan. The film may be impressive in how it pays no extra respect to the stardom of those in it, but perhaps SJ Suryah has reached a point in his stardom where he’s towering above the graph of a rather rooted character like Sethu. There isn’t much space for him to play to the gallery as he likes to do, but on occasion, he seems like he’s trying to stretch the rules of his character a bit more than he should. It means that when he moves from comedy (“Thani aalaa mudichiya? Gang-a mudichingalaa?”) to menace (“Nee yenakku velai seiviyaa nu kekkala, velai seiya poranu solren.”), the effect isn’t as powerful; the danger doesn’t feel as real. Also, Sethu doesn’t feel particularly well-written. Even if I enjoyed how the film gracefully moves from Durai to Sethu, the latter should ostensibly feel more dangerous. There’s a bit about how manipulative he can be, but for lack of serious exploration of the Sethu-Muthu relationship, even Muthu’s shifting loyalties feel undercooked. And this is a bigger issue—since Raayan and family disbanding ought to create a lot more emotion than it does. For lack of powerful writing in these spaces, the twists don’t feel as organically arrived at. The eventual explanation is all right in theory but feels too hurried for such a dramatic transformation.

Despite Raayan and Durga helping humanise each other, we still consume the film from a distance, perhaps because of their stoic exterior. I suppose Raayan and Durga don’t have the liberty and luxury of being ‘likeable’; perhaps when you are fighting fires all the time, it’s natural for the soot and ash to become a part of you. Somewhere near the beginning, Raayan compares himself to a dog and says that if the latter can survive without a home, so can he. The difference, of course, is that a dog can wag its tail about even in such suffering and express love to the world, but a human cannot—and so, Raayan doesn’t, but this means that Dhanush risks Raayan, the film, feeling rather cold (or perhaps that’s exactly how he wants it). I do wish though that the film had done more justice to the Muthu-Manickam relationship. Perhaps that might have made me feel a bit more for either of them.

There’s a certain purity, however, to Dhanush’s directorial voice. That magnificent shot of the Raayan trio in full flight stands testament to his visual imagination. And yet, the film breaks for an interval during a narrative break, as Raayan and siblings are forced to move again. A lesser filmmaker might have prioritised the elevation moment for the Raayan brothers as a better half-way point, but Dhanush’s loyalties lie with the story. That’s why we see that at the beginning of the film, around half-way, and at the end of the film, it’s the same idea being reinforced: Raayan and family moving out to nowhere. Where they go, violence and bloodshed, it seems, follow. Dhanush is great with the smaller touches too. Like Muthu cutting off a wire to switch off a speaker, instead of requesting someone to reduce the volume. Like Manickam’s repeated attempts at remorse. Like Durga singing a song to Raayan in the terrace, which, again, in a lesser film, might have led to a full song about their relationship. Even when Durga asks him why he keeps cutting his hair off, you warm up for some emotional story. Instead, I laughed out loud at Raayan's reply: “Style.”

You know that a director truly cares about meaningful cinema when he won’t even prioritise his own stardom as an actor. This means that in Raayan, Dhanush has the time and patience to address smaller queries. Why isn’t Durga keen on marriage? Why does Raayan not care about educating Durga? So uninterested is Dhanush in amping up his own stardom with this film that he doesn’t even care about giving himself a particularly special opening scene—and somehow, that makes it more special. He’s wearing an apron and making some fast food. With his directorial work, however, Dhanush is showing that he isn’t really interested in fast-food cinema. And that means that even if the dish isn’t necessarily perfect, I’m quite happy to say, “Do keep cooking.”