From Kamal Haasan's Vikram to Sai Pallavi's Gargi, here's the list of best Tamil films of 2022

Tamil cinema gave the globe some solid blockbusters and searing pieces of work in 2022. From Kamal Haasan’s Vikram to Sai Pallavi’s Gargi, here’s the list of best Tamil films of 2022.

Saani Kaayidham: Arun Matheswaran’s dark vivid shocking and brutal revenge story in Tamil, was unlike anything we had seen in recent times. Keerthy Suresh in a stand-out performance, makes Uma Thurman in Kill Bill look like a novice. She is raw brutal and direct; so is her revenge. So is this outstanding blunt and gory film, not meant for the faint-hearted. Saani Kaayidham , which means something cheap pulp paper, grabs you by the neck and squeezes the breath out of you until you beg for mercy. It is a relentlessly violent film with no respite from the bestiality that empowered men feel over underprivileged men and specially women.That the film’s protagonist Ponni happens to be a police constable doesn’t help her escape the brutal violation she faces. Keerthy’s partner in crime Selvaraghavan (Dhanush’s brother) was also a fierce force of nature. They made the most unlikely Bonnie & Clyde . But it’s Keerthy whose chilling vendetta had us riveted.

Thiruchitrambalam: I have to confess that I did not like Dhanush in his four films in 2022, Jagame Thandhiram, Atrangi Re, Maaran and The Gray Man. Thiruchitrambalam is not just the most endearing Tamil film of the year, it is probably THE most successful film of Dhanush’s caree. This is the kind of film that does not fail to reach out to any section of the audience. Its casting, which is so apt, it makes you wonder why more films in India don’t think of unorthodox casting. Veteran filmmaker Bharati Raja as Dhanush’s grandfather is a masterstroke. Without doubt, Raja is excellent. But this is the kind of cinema where it is easy to mistake the character for the performance. How do we know if the ever-sparkling Nithya Menen is really as winsome as she appears to be? Her dialogues, her scenes with her bestie Dhanush and her relationship with Dhanush’s grandfather and father(the ubiquitous and always dependable Prakash Raj) are so remarkably cogent and connectible, you feel like showering hosannas on the writer-director Mithran R Jawahar who gets the cuteness of a rom-com out of the way in time to explore a darker more revealing side to the entire myth of perfect love.

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Vikram: This is a fearless piece of cinema. The colours of revenge and bloodshed peek at us from every frame , often indicating a universe gone awfully awry in its quest for self-fulfilment. Although Kamal Haasan plays the title role, Fahadh Faasil dominates the show without a moment of flashy acting .He looks like a man on a mission committed to getting it right. Anyone who tells you they follow the entire course of the zigzagging plot would be lying. However, making concessions for the Kamal Haasan brand of intellectualized espionage, Vikram grips you even when the narrative gets too dense to follow.

Gargi: There is so much to admire in Gautham Ramachandran’s Tamil film Gargi, that it becomes heartbreaking to watch it throw it all away in pursuit of a “shocking” unexpected senseless self-defeating twist at the end. Sai Pallavi once again plays the pertinacious working class girl. In fact it can’t get any more working class than this: Gargi’s father Brahmanand (R S Shivaji) is a watchman in a building. Gargi works as school teacher. She is engaged to marry a man who is considerate and amusing. There is a cute upma joke about Gargi’s mother at the start between Gargi and her man. When she smiles the world seems a better place. Gargi’s toil-filled but peaceful existence comes tumbling down when her father is held as one of the accused in gruesome crime. The stigmatization of Gargi’s family, the isolation and humiliation, the trial by media…are all sensitively adumbrated in the screenplay. Sai Pallavi makes Gargi’s struggle so tangible, it is as though we are sweating and sobbing it out with her. We want her to just ….slow down.

Love Today: Whenever I see a truly original Indian film, I feel like doing cartwheels. And if it is original and engaging, like this Tamil film, nothing like it. Love Today is almost entirely devoted to doing a savoury probe into the culture of the smartphone . The phone is indeed the central character of the devious plot. Pradeep Ranganathan who wrote the screenplay based on his own short film App(a) Lock, is a man of ideas. Though saturated in schmaltz sweetness and foreseeable solutions to tangles in the repartee-heavy plot, the screenplay in spite of its filminess (as in filmy and flimsy) succeeds in tearing out a telling point on how pathologically dependent modern relationships have become on the content of one’s phone. Love Today has its blind spots . It is way too flighty and flirtatious in tone ;some of the drama between the hero and his mother and between the hero and his friends is too contrived to be convincing. And yet as a comment on how far and deep the cellphone has taken over our lives, Love Today is bang-on.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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