Naangal review: A haunting memoir of Tamil brothers, steeped in childhood trauma

Three preadolescent siblings — Karthik (Mithun V, eldest, 13 years old), Dhruv (Rithik Mohan) and Gautam (Nithin D) — live somewhere near Lovedale in the hills of Tamil Nadu with their father (Abdul Rafe as Rajkumar) who owns plantations, a house too huge for four individuals and is the Chairman and Principal of their modest school.

He also schools them in the most abusive and emotionally violent ways. Their happiness — the ‘ups’ — is in going to the movies, reading books, helping plantation workers, glancing at a girl in the library, sharing a candy with a kid on the bus or simply being themselves when their father is not around. Their ‘downs’ are numerous. They do all the chores around the house and outside, buy provisions and vegetables, clean the house and toilets, and tend to their father whose presence looms large even when he is physically absent.

A revolving door

The temporality of Naangal is also dictated by how it jumps timelines to provide context. It does this in instalments because it runs on the horrifying, unspoken reality of little children doing the kind of physical and emotional labour that even adults in 2024 will be advised to avoid. We stay mostly in the 1990s, beginning in 1998, charting towards 2000 while occasionally jumping to 1992, 1995, 1997 and then looping back. The film is structured and designed like a revolving door; experiences that set the boys briefly forward only draw them back to their hell at the next instant.

Avinash has also written, edited and shot the film. His dissolves are few but effective — during one of the boys’ several low points, the scene slowly shifts to a shot of a train on the left moving up the frame and a bus on the right moving down the frame, their displacement and disillusionment palpable.

If there isn’t a dissolve during a heavy moment, a scene is interrupted by a dynamic cut, like a pretend karate punch quickly moves to the interior of a house and removes the illusion of lightness in the proceedings. The stillness of the hill station setting and the vast emptiness, the absence of sunlight within the household add to the mood of the film.

It is cold, thunderous and dark during nighttime and all shadows during daytime; a single ray of sunshine or two illuminate the boys standing in attention in front of their father. Avinash also selectively goes for monochrome when the father is at his worst. Colour adds levity and paints a more shared experience when we are briefly let into this beast of a man, mostly unfeeling, often irritable and occasionally wrathful. He does not look the part; he even breaks down but often it is insincere.

The film isn’t humourless; the way Rafe plays Rajkumar when he is in a self-victimizing mode draws a laugh or two, making us wonder how he is doing and saying all this with a straight face. But Naangal goes for that complexity in his character. He can really be as calculating as he can be clueless, someone acutely aware of his failures. He can treat his own children like an aristocratic family treats its household staff in the nineteenth century, but yell at a teacher for beating a student.

An intensely personal work

Naangal is a memoir that is steeped in childhood trauma and distanced from more gleeful representations usually associated with the time. We meet their mother Padma (Prarthana Srikaanth), who is removed from this family, their other parent but one who might be more loving but nonetheless dispassionate. Their bonding moment is illustrated by a shared love for a 1990 Tamil song, possibly the last time they felt some real affection, something they try to resuscitate whenever possible. We wonder why she doesn’t put up more of a fight, why she leaves even when the boys are begging for her to stay longer. But scenes hit harder when information is withheld.

The only living thing the boys love more than anyone in the world is their dog, Cathy. When Rajkumar beats the dog, things come to a boil. When Avinash elevates the film to a dramatic tone for the first time, it ends with the boys going to their mother’s. This act of violence is interspersed with a series of events between 1995 and 1997 that ends with the mother leaving the family for good, gently suggesting that domestic abuse might have been a factor. Cathy’s breathing — heavy, intense but normal for a dog — is something we hear from the younger boys, too, at their most agitated state, an alarming sound used to great effect.

At a runtime of just over four hours, Naangal can be indulgent and begs the question of what would be amiss if this was a less than three-hour film. Maybe not much, the film’s inherent thesis lies in how those years of ill-treatment, gaslighting, loneliness was harsher and harsher for these boys and the edit pattern is such that they were made to take responsibility for the actions of the adults in their lives. Adults who couldn’t come to terms with constant missteps. Forsaking freedom, for them, meant an inability to distinguish between hate and tough love.

Even during a rare restaurant sojourn, the father orders food for them, not even bothering to ask what they would like to eat. There is a thoughtful intimate close-up of him berating them at the table and then a switch to medium shot with the boys in the frame listening to him say, “let’s agree to do better”.

The length of the film is effective when we think of the fold in timelines and realize that the father refused to speak to the children for months, but the runtime is really felt when the point of repetition is made ad nauseum. Naangal does succeed in orienting itself as an intensely personal work, personal enough for us to feel like voyeurs, as if we’ve overstayed our welcome and these boys have their hands full, and the last thing they need is us peering through the cracks at them.