How Kumararaja changed the grammar of Tamil cinema

In 16 years, Thiagarajan Kumararaja has made just two films and one show for Prime Video. Yet few filmmakers have had a larger influence on the generation that followed him.

Watching Arun Matheswaran’s DC and Karthik Subbaraj’s Dorothy more recently, I was fascinated by the evolution of Tamil neo-noir and the influence Kumararaja has had over modern filmmakers for the last decade and a half.

When Aaranya Kaandam arrived in 2011, it seemed to have wandered in from another Tamil cinema. A gangster film with parallel tracks, no conventional hero, romance or even a moral centre, the world of Aaranya Kaandam was packed with eccentric characters discussing pop culture, dark humour, sudden violence and narrative detours. Kumararaja could cut from brutality to a retro song and somehow make the two belong together. The film won a National Award, but its more enduring legacy was the filmmakers who saw what it was doing.

Here’s what’s unique about his storytelling.

Straight into the plot

I remember asking him during an interview about his storytelling style, given that his plots always kick in during the very first scene — the first scene is his inciting incident, and characters are best discovered through what they do rather than who they are. When many Tamil films back in the day would start right before the interval with a line about how the real movie starts now, he would wonder, “What were you doing till now?”

Kumararaja’s own cinematic diet included everything from Visu to Andrei Tarkovsky, and from Quentin Tarantino to Lars von Trier and Pedro Almodóvar. Drawing on these eclectic influences, he figured out an organic way to infuse the Tamil cinema he grew up watching, with neo-noir elements and existentialism. His films are gritty but playful, referential but rooted, violent but funny, and pulpy but formally ambitious. He entertains and provokes through his choice of plot.

Making it bizarre

Let the audience know right at the start that bizarre stuff will happen. What happens when a gangster goes limp? Aaranya Kaandam.

What happens when a man randomly dies halfway during sex with his secret lover? Super Deluxe, a film that kept foreshadowing the sci-fi twist all through. Even the Modern Love story he directed was supposed to be based on a true story. But reality doesn’t excite him as much as how to make it bizarre. He asked himself: “How would Charlie Kauffman do it?” Today filmmakers wonder: “How would Kumararaja do it.”

Embracing myth-making

Multiple storylines, different timelines, unpredictable character behaviour, drama and comedy, tears and laughs, opposite ideologies — dark and light, science and spirituality, karma and dharma, the gender politics between the masculine and feminine — all blend seamlessly into his craft. After all, he started as a dialogue writer for Pushkar and Gayatri with Orum Po, a skill he uses to stay in control of mood and meaning, a freedom that lets him tell only the interesting parts of the story, in the structure that best helps him play out the drama and the larger learning in the film. In books, they would make for separate chapters. But in the Kumararaja Universe, they are all next door. He plants Easter eggs and connections to make the “everything is connected” experience more fun for fans.

Cool retro music

Kumararaja’s retro needle drops may have been inspired by Quentin Tarantino. Like Tarantino, Kumararaja has an ear for music — something catchy but forgotten, used in a new light. His script Summer Holiday for our collaborative experiment, X - Past is Present specified the song playing on the radio, what time it would get interrupted by a power cut and which part of Aasaiya kaathula thoothu vittu would play during the big reveal. The song lyrics are a part of the film’s narrative. If Quentin finally convinced Ennio Morricone to compose for him, Kumararaja has Ilaiyaraja by his side, composing original music.

Playing with the form

It’s not happening because it happens in real life. It’s happening because these things happen in stories. And Kumararaja reminds you that it’s all a story all the time —from the stylised interior design, the way the camera moves — sometimes pausing halfway into a voiceover as in Aaranya Kaandam, the meticulously planned needle drops, the referential scores — like the nadaswaram version of the Star Wars theme ‘Flight of the Ex’ (also to foreshadow the sci-fi twist most recently recycled by Karthik Subbaraj in Dorothy) or the passionate relationship people in his movies have with their movies. In Aaranya Kaandam, we learn that necessity is morality. The big message in Super Deluxe is that there is no message.

By 2026, the lineage has become almost literal as Arun Matheswaran directs Lokesh Kanagaraj himself as the romantic action hero of DC. One generation’s filmmaker became the next generation’s star.

The journey from Aaranya Kaandam in 2010 to DC in 2026 is therefore not simply a story about filmmakers influenced by Kumararaja. It is about how a set of once-unusual ideas — neo-noir, fragmented storytelling, tonal collisions, referentiality, dark humour and the romanticisation of violence through style — migrated from the margins into the mainstream.

Let’s not forget the influence he has also had over collaborators. Post Aaranya Kaandam, Kumararaja worked as a writer with 11 filmmakers on my film X-Past is Present, four writers on Super Deluxe and four more directors on Modern Love.

Kumararaja may have made only two and a half films. But somewhere along the way, he helped give Tamil cinema a new language.

And three generations are still speaking it. True to his philosophy, Kumararaja himself doesn’t think it’s all that true. Everything is random. “You are giving me too much credit,” he laughs.