Cast: Vimal, Iniya, Bala Saravanan
Director: Prasanth Pandiyaraj
It's easy to dismiss Prasanth Pandiyaraj's Vilangu as another one of those Zee5 shows that run solely on shock value. Starring the perpetual man-next-door Vimal, the mini-series begins in a familiar setting full of familiar faces in a very familiar kind of thriller. The staging is clunky, the dubbing sounds off, and the tone is that of a low-budget stage-play that requires its actors to hurl expletives to wake up its audience.
Set in and around the indistinct Vembad police station outside Tiruchy, it's the kind of workplace SI Parithi (a solid Vimal) can simply run back to mid-sleep, in his night clothes because its too regular a place for phrases like "work-life balance". Given the bland manner in which the show takes us around the village and its people, it has to rely heavily on its cliffhangers to bring the audience back for the next episode.
What makes the first few episodes even harder to sit through is Parithi's ultra-generic domestic life. With a fully-pregnant wife and warring parents on either side, even casting Iniya opposite Vimal (the lovely couple from Vaagai Sooda Vaa) doesn't generate the sort of concern we're meant to feel for them. Add to this the stress of new crimes mounting every hour, Parithi's plight should have felt like he's stuck in a pressure cooker.
But when you look back at these episodes having completed the show, you begin to understand that some of this was by design. Like being given pieces to a complex puzzle, it's not meant to make sense or stand on its own. But as the names and events start getting a context, we get handcuffed to Vilangu and its plot.
It's a clever way to point the finger back at the audience because the show's most important character is one we've failed to notice till then. Except for a name, we too have refused to acknowledge this man's existence, much like the people of Vembad. So when this character returns to tell us his side of the story — a result of society's apathy — the vilangu is placed on the viewer because we too have committed this crime.
And that feels like the point too because criminals aren't born as much as they are made. When this character narrates his life's story, which includes several crimes, we're told that even such a person deserves our collective empathy and how it's never too late to be humane. It's the kind of depth you would not expect from a show that begins with so many glamorised sequences of institutional violence. Hidden beneath a stressful psycho-killer thriller is also a gentle appeal against corporal punishment.
It's impossible to talk further about the show's plot without exposing some of its priceless twists. But more than the manner in which the show gradually shifts gears, it's how it goes back to a detail from an earlier episode that makes its script so "web-series complaint". In other words, it's not a feature film that got chopped into seven pieces. With the luxury of time to explore individual characters and those in-between moments, Vilangu plays out like a crime novel that requires you to flip back a few pages to analyse why we ignored all the clues it had planted.
This results in amazing payoffs towards the middle which includes an excellent stretch of dark comedy. Stuck between one's natural instinct to attack and the need to resist at all costs, even Parithi's flat personality moves aside to give us a wonderfully conflicted man with lots to lose. And when the series freezes at ordinary shots of just two men eating biriyani, it's like the jokes on you for taking these characters (and the show) lightly.
Eventually, a lot of the reason why Vilangu works so well is because it broke a mould in the way its villain is written. Played by a terrific actor with a mix of complete indifference (he never lets you meet his eye-line) and subordination, he uses his paavamness like a nuclear weapon. Which is why one major mistake in Vilangu was the way it forces an explanation towards the end to underline how clever this character was. Another misstep was the way Parithi admits to having understood everything too. I felt one of the points of having an actor like Vimal play a policeman was to free the character of being perfect and heroic, yet this declaration felt unnecessary for a show that respects its villain so much.
Despite these, Vilangu is a rare Tamil series that knows how to use the advantages of its format to great use. Whoever thought a solid psycho thriller could be hiding in plain sight.