Four Tamil migrant workers get arrested by the police in the neighboring state of Āndhra Pradēś. They are accused of a crime they have not committed. As they can hardly speak Telugu, the authorities can do what they want with them – and they do exactly that. Nearly one third of the criminal cases in India comes to this end: a false confession is soon followed by a conviction. The case is solved, the file is shelved, the target is met and the statistics are in order. That never happens in this film, because something far worse happens: Once again they are in the wrong place at the wrong time and get wind of a cabal in which the authorities are heavily entangled.
Vetrimarran, master student of the great Bālū Mahēndra, is the shooting star of Tamil cinema. His films are robust (Pollātavaṉ, 2007; Āṭukaḷam, 2011), firmly anchored in the everyday life of his state, its culture and its politics. Often, the tone of his films is brutally realistic and with aggressively melodramatic peaks. A similarly brilliant political thriller like Vicāraṇai, following the tradition of Damiani or Boisset, has not been made in our part of the world in the last few decades.
