By Ram Jadhav | CinemaDose
Ananthan Kaadu Review Director Jiyen Krishnakumar’s second film arrives with a lot riding on it. After the promise of his debut “Tiyaan,” and with Murali Gopy the writer behind “Lucifer” and “Empuraan” on script duty, “Ananthan Kaadu” had every reason to feel like an event. It’s got scale, a politically charged period setting, and a cast that includes Arya, Regina Cassandra, and Murali Gopy himself. What it doesn’t quite have, unfortunately, is a script that matches the ambition of everything around it.
The Setup
Set in the early 1990s against the backdrop of Thiruvananthapuram, the story follows Thankaraj and his gang men with a violent criminal past who’ve since gone straight, running an orchestra group instead. That fragile peace breaks when they take in a Tamil man named Mani, and the film spends its runtime tracing what unravels after his arrival. Arya plays Vetrivel, a man caught in a conflict that was never really his to inherit, and it’s a role that asks him to hold grit and vulnerability in the same breath something he mostly pulls off.
The film also weaves in heavier historical threads: references to the Sri Lankan Eelam conflict and the caste politics of that era, alongside a subplot involving a fictional Chief Minister and a former Communist revolutionary turned enforcer. There’s clearly an attempt here to say something bigger than a straightforward revenge story.
Where It Works
The first act is genuinely strong. Krishnakumar shoots a massacre, a home invasion, and a college brawl with a command of color and composition that immediately signals this isn’t a small film. Indrans turns in a strong supporting performance, and Telugu actor Sunil makes a solid impression in a role that could’ve easily been forgettable. For a stretch, “Ananthan Kaadu” feels like it’s building toward something with real weight a film unafraid to let its politics and its violence sit uncomfortably close together.
Where It Falls Apart
The problem is the back half. Once the film moves past its ambitious, historically grounded setup, it settles into a fairly conventional revenge template — a powerful political figure betrays his own men, and they go out to settle the score. It’s a structure we’ve seen many times before, and “Ananthan Kaadu” doesn’t do enough with it to justify the nearly three-hour runtime.
Murali Gopy’s writing, which has real bite in his best work, leans hard into rhetorical, rhyming dialogue here characters speaking in a stylized, colloquial cadence that occasionally lands and often just feels like the writer showing off vocabulary rather than serving the scene. The film also loses precision the longer it runs: violence gets stretched past the point of impact, and side characters who should deepen the world instead blur together, undistinguished from one another.
CinemaDose Take
“Ananthan Kaadu” is a frustrating watch precisely because you can see the better film buried inside it. The first 40 minutes suggest something as sharp and confident as “Tiyaan,” and the cast particularly Arya and Indrans never stops trying to sell the material even as the script loses its grip. But ambition alone doesn’t carry a film for three hours, and by the time the predictable revenge arc kicks in fully, the historical weight the film spent so much time establishing starts to feel more like decoration than substance. Worth watching for the craft on display in its first half; go in with tempered expectations for where it ends up.
Quick Facts: Ananthan Kaadu Review
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Director | Jiyen Krishnakumar |
| Writer | Murali Gopy |
| Lead Cast | Arya, Murali Gopy, Regina Cassandra, Indrans, Sunil |
| Languages | Malayalam, Tamil |
| Setting | Thiruvananthapuram, early 1990s |
| Genre | Political action thriller |
| Runtime | Approx. 175 minutes |
FAQ
Is Ananthan Kaadu based on a true story? No, it’s a fictional story, though it draws on real historical backdrop — the Sri Lankan Eelam conflict and the caste politics of 1980s-90s Thiruvananthapuram — to ground its narrative.
Is Ananthan Kaadu connected to Jiyen Krishnakumar’s earlier film Tiyaan? Not as a direct sequel or shared universe, but it’s his follow-up feature and carries some of the same large-scale, visually ambitious storytelling style.
Who plays the lead role in Ananthan Kaadu? Arya plays Vetrivel, the film’s central character, alongside Murali Gopy and Regina Cassandra in significant roles.
Is the film worth watching for Murali Gopy’s writing alone? If you’re a fan of his stylized, rhetorical dialogue (as seen in Lucifer), there are moments that deliver. But the overall script is considered less sharp and more predictable than his earlier work.
Written by Ram Jadhav for CinemaDose — covering Bollywood and South Indian cinema, box office news, and new releases.
