Mullum Malarum

Thorns and blossoms: Mahendran's masterwork and the cinema Tamil Nadu almost missed

"Mullum Malarum asks a simple question — what does a man owe the people who love him? — and spends 143 minutes refusing to answer it simply."

Released in 1978 during a remarkable period of creative ferment in Tamil cinema, J. Mahendran's second feature arrived with little fanfare and left with a reputation that has only grown in the decades since.

Rajinikanth, then still an actor finding the edges of his own charisma, gives what many consider the finest performance of his early career. The volatility that would later calcify into myth is here raw, unpolished, genuinely surprising.