Raayan Review | A Bloodbath That Started off Compellingly and Ended Generically

The first half of the new Dhanush film, Raayan, written and directed by, Dhanush himself, is thoroughly absorbing. There is a deliberate effort to walk away from the conventional treatment of a mass hero film where the leading man’s only mission is protecting his family. There is only one instance in the entire first half where we see Raayan unleashing himself on the bad guys. But post the interval when the writing tries to infuse a drama within the family dynamics, there is a sense of genericness to the writing, and even though there are unexpected reactions from certain characters, what it made us anticipate at the midpoint was not quite there when the movie ended.

Raayan, our title character, has two younger brothers and a younger sister. At a really young age, when his sister was an infant, Raayan’s parents went missing, and since that day, Raayan has been protecting his siblings and raising them from his own earnings. While Muthu, his second brother, was a drunkard with no major focus in life, the other two, Manickam and Durga, were fairly ambitious. At one point, when the newly appointed police commissioner was planning to end the gang war by creating issues among the gangsters, Muthu unnecessarily got involved in it, and Raayan had to intervene to save his brother. How that intervention creates problems for the whole family and what happens after that is what we see in Dhanush’s 50th film, Raayan.

After setting up the story with that flashback of Raayan and his siblings, there is a very gentle world-building happening in the film. Raayan is always the calm and composed figure in the family, and he wants his brothers to maintain a low profile. And we can see Raayan meeting big names in the city to apologize for the mess his brother created. Dhanush maintains Raayan, as someone who will cross the line only for the family. And in that brilliantly choreographed pre-interval fight, we can see that transition and stand of Raayan. Post-interval, there is an ideological rift happening in the family. Even though we were shown instances of indifference between the brothers, them leading to a split in the family was something I couldn’t digest. And the rapid escalation of the family feud made things even more unconvincing. Because of the lack of conviction in establishing that rift, everything that followed, which had a template nature, had a reduced energy to its credit.

Dhanush, as Raayan, plays the part very convincingly with a believable restrain in his body language. The demeanor, the lack of a smile on his face, and the unflinching nature in the way Raayan talks, etc., make that character rough, empathetic, and believable. Sudeep Kishan, as Muthu, plays this loud character who always has an excuse for his deeds. Almost all the characters Kalidas has played in his career have a sense of naivety attached to them, and when you look at the character pool, Manickam is the most naive one. Thankfully, Dhanush hasn’t cast Dushara Vijayan for an unimportant role. In the second half, she gets prominent screen space, and the opinion of her character matters to the story. Aparna Balamurali gets this over-the-top lover character, but the character is somewhat ignored in the second half. SJ Suryah is in his typical eccentric elements in this movie. In instances like the very first meeting between Raayan and Sethu, that style really enhances the commercial appeal. Prakashraj has done a character, which is more of a cameo in this film.

Compared to his previous directorial, Pa Paandi, there is a significant shift in how Dhanush converts script to screen. Om Prakash’s cinematography uses warm tones, silhouettes, reds, greens, and blue tones to communicate the drama in the story. Visual elements had a significant role in making the fights and killings in this movie look appealing on screen. And there is a conscious effort, especially in the first half, to reduce the redundancy. A tweak will be there in certain scripting tropes we are familiar with. As I already said, it is the lack of conviction in establishing that rift among brothers that is causing issues for Raayan when it reaches the last quarter of its runtime.

On the whole, Raayan is a movie that has its share of dramatic moments and subtle mass euphoric moments. If the central conflict was mounted in a more impactful way, I think the movie would have had a bigger impact on the audience. The visual storytelling that used colors and played with shadows to give a metaphorical layer to the story deserved a script with a gripping finale.