Metropolis

Fashion designer by training, bank clerk by profession, filmmaker through sheer drive and desire: this is Lokesh Kanagaraj, whose Metropolis was among last year's biggest surprises. With that kind of biography, we might imagine him as one of the film’s four pointedly nameless characters drifting through the long Chennai nights and bleak Chennai days – an office worker, perhaps, suddenly finding himself sucked into a vortex of casual betrayal and shattered hopes in an urban environment where gangsters of all kinds seem to just be part of the scenery and nobody cares for the beaten-to-a-pulp human mess by the wayside.

Part urban noir, part social realist exposé, part melodrama where the fates of urbanites crisscross with those of recent arrivals from the countryside, Metropolis offers a picture of Tamil Nadu’s capital that is as unflattering as it is, strangely enough, hopeful.