Evil Engulfs

Nalan Kumarasamy won the first season of Naalaya Iyakunar, a TV talent competition for filmmakers that brought him to immediate prominence. Like the other main discoveries of that show, Karthik Subbaraj and Balaji Mohan, Nalan Kumarasamy has a fabulously irascible/crazy sense of humour, as witnessed in his debut feature – a wild, often absurdist mix of crime flick and sharp social satire titled Evil Engulfs, again based on a short called Enna Nadanthathu Na.

Meet Das, a professional kidnapper (cum world-class bullshitter), who takes on a bunch of youngsters as his assistants. Das might be a loser if not an outright idiot, but at least he’s a loser/idiot with principles. One of these is: “never kidnap someone involved in politics”. But what do you do if you’re tricked into doing just that? Could we maybe, just maybe, also read this as a spoof on a filmmaking world based on an apprenticeship system – a world Kumarasamy defied by going his own way?

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