Karuppu Review: Is This the Must-Watch Tamil Film of the Year?
I went into Karuppu with cautious expectations. Suriya is an actor I have always admired and followed closely over the years, but recently the films around him have not always done him justice. I was hoping this one would be different. By the time the credits rolled I was sitting there thinking yes, that is the Suriya I know.
The film lives inside a legal system that has rotted from the inside out. Nobody in this world expects justice anymore they just hope for it, the way you hope for rain in a drought. Sitting in the corner of the courthouse is a small idol of Vettai Karuppu, the folk deity, watching everything unfold in silence. It is a small detail but the film knows exactly what it is doing with it, and that image threads quietly through everything that follows.
RJ Balaji directs with a confidence I did not expect. He also plays the villain, and honestly there were moments where I wanted to jump out of my seat and through the screen and punch at him. That is how good he is in the role. The film is in no hurry and I mean that as a compliment.
It takes its time, builds its world carefully, introduces you to people you start to care about. Trisha Krishnan is excellent she brings real intelligence to her role and never lets it slip into something decorative. Indrans, the veteran Malayalam actor, has maybe twenty minutes of screen time and leaves one of the strongest impressions in the whole film.
Sai Abhyankkar’s music feels alive, folk-rooted and restless, exactly right for the story being told.
And then there is Suriya.
I have been watching him since the early 2000s and I can say without any hesitation that what he does in the climax of this film is among the finest work of his career. He says very little. He barely moves. And yet everything the anger, the grief, the exhaustion of a man / God who has carried too much for too long is right there on his face, in his posture, in the way he simply stands and looks at the person across from him.
There is one particular moment where the silence says more than any dialogue could, and I felt it physically. The woman sitting next to me grabbed her husband’s arm.
That is what great acting does. It stops being performance and starts being truth.
Karuppu is not without its flaws the pacing stumbles in the second act and a couple of subplots deserved more room to breathe. But none of that lingers. What lingers is Suriya in that final act, reminding a packed cinema why he has mattered for so long.
Take your family this bank holiday. You will not regret it.
Karuppu is showing at Cineworld Ilford and across the UK — Birmingham, Bradford, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, The O2 Greenwich and Wandsworth. Book at cineworld.co.uk
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