Kulasami Movie Review: Dull at best and strangely amusing at worst

Kulasami belongs to the group of films that present a premature answer to collective social angst. While Tamil cinema is known for brilliant films that portray relevant social themes, it also churns out films that fail miserably at it. Through its central premise, Kulasami tries to portray the collective social anger towards the rising violence against women but does so with half-baked ideas, ill-formed judgements, and immature solutions for the problem. The film opens with a vigilante hunting down rapists and killing them by mutilating their privates in multiple creative ways. While it is painfully obvious that the vigilante is the auto driver Soora Sangu played by Vemal, it is overshadowed by other glaring issues that strangely entertain us as much as they baffle us.

Director: Saravana Sakthi
Cast: Vemal, Tanya Hope, Vinodhini Vaidyanathan

The film has multiple moments that confuse us before making us chuckle at its sheer oddity. A drunken Soora Sangu casually walks into a lab where medical students are studying cadavers. The management doesn’t question him because one of those cadavers happens to be his sister. What is even more baffling is that he is allowed to do this every day. The cherry on top is the fact that his visiting time serves as a plot point later when Tanya Hope’s character, who is being chased down by goons, remembers Soora Sangu’s visiting time and leads the goons to him. 

The main antagonists in the film, through the guise of providing financial aid, manipulate college women and blackmail them for sexual favours. This is stated and overstated through long overindulgent scenes that achieve nothing more than making you squirm in your seat. And the uncomfortableness is as much due to the awkward performances as it is due to the disturbing subject matter. Speaking of performances, the film does a good job of making us forget that Vemal had given us highly competent performances in earlier films. Through a major portion of the film, Vemal just meanders from one scene to another, making sad mopey faces before randomly bursting into tears. There are scenes where it looks like Vemal was just randomly pushed in front of the camera and asked to whimper with no context. 

The film has dialogues written by Vijay Sethupathi. One might think that an actor who is known for grounded realistic performances has a good understanding of human emotions. However, the dialogues in Kulasami have a distinct quality that is similar to the “uncanny valley” effect attributed to bad CGI faces. They might sound like your typical filmy dialogues but they’re also not something anyone would utter in real life. Case in point is the dialogue Vemal says to his friend before killing him, "Anna, mama, friend-u nu neenga irukkradha nambi thaana da inga ponnungala valakkurom, neengale ipdi panna naanga sevvai grakathukku poyaa da ponnungala valakkrathu." It starts fine and then the "sevvai graham" hits you out of nowhere and makes you chuckle in the middle of a supposedly gripping scene. Maybe, when they say Vijay Sethupathi wrote the dialogues, what they meant was that he sat in front of the computer and prompted ChatGPT to write the dialogues because that is what they sound like. 

The writing erratically shifts from one plot point to another whenever it chooses to. As soon as we see Soora Sangu moping around, we know that a flashback is due but the film makes us wait only to give us a predictable backstory. Kulasami could be entertaining if you know how to extract humour out of the absurd moments and have the patience to sit through the dull, over-indulgent scenes.