Driven to extremes: "Thudarum"

Set against March's Lucifer sequel - the hardy South Indian megastar Mohanlal's swaggering spring statement - Thudarum invites reception as a smaller, more personal star vehicle. It still opens with a horrific-looking mudslide bringing about mass casualties, and an introductory scene in which our hero sees fit to namecheck himself. "A gentle touch will carry the story forward," promises an early song. We'll see about that. Where the Lucifers gave us Mohanlal as a supernaturally gifted power player, the new film recasts the star as an Indian Everyman: an old-school taxi driver (smalltown clientbase, no apps) who goes by the nickname Benz yet plies his trade in a battered black Ambassador Mark 1, returning each night to the home he shares with his wife, daughter, son and dog. At first, the emergent narrative strategist Tharun Moorthy (who directs here, and co-writes with K.R. Sunil) presents Benz as broadly comparable to the trad dads in the various iterations of the much-remade Papanasam: he's shown squabbling with his kids about phone use, bowing down to a spouse (Shobana) who shapes up as the real dominant force in this household, and showing off the on-set stills that mark him as a true film fan (perhaps even some alt-reality version of Mohanlal himself, one who worked as a stuntman before settling down and shunning the spotlight). We await the inciting incident, having been schooled by now-innumerable vehicles for aging action stars to expect this will be the kidnapping of a family member, whether helpless wife or hapless offspring. The wild twist Moorthy and Sunil serve up is to make the abducted party here the car, impounded by cops as evidence after an employee at Benz's garage is accused of smuggling marijuana.

It's the kind of manoeuvre the Malayalam cinema has come to specialise in: think of a familiar set-up, maybe even one as battered from overuse as the Ambassador itself, and then give it a fresh, and in this case thumpingly enjoyable, spin. This material is newly characterful: Benz is so devoted to the old banger his first instinct is to turn up in the impound lot with a bucket of water to wash it. ("This isn't your wife's house!," cries one of his uniformed nemeses.) Unpredictable, too: the car's fate gets tangled up with one junior officer's upcoming nuptials, which results in Benz being pressganged into serving as a getaway driver for enforcers planning a night of off-the-clock boozing and worse besides. For much of the duration, this script is a brilliant balancing act. The stakes are high enough for there to appear real jeopardy; with the taxi locked away, Benz faces losing his livelihood, an item that means the world to him, and eventually his life. Yet the transportation Moorthy and Sunil deploy to carry us there is just leftfield enough for the whole situation to seem blackly, nudgingly funny in some way: dude, where's his car? It's Hitchcock territory, in other words, and as the ad hoc wedding party veers into the forests of Kerala - off the beaten track, into the realm of wild beasts and only more trouble - Thudarum gets only wilder and wilder. Now there's a body in the boot, now there are snakes in the grass, and we're still not quite sure when or where that fateful mudslide is going to re-enter the picture.

This is, then, the type of thriller one has to judge by the quality and force of its narrative line; that title (To Be Continued, in English translation) admits as much. The turbocharged second half, which unfolds in torrential rain, at first seems to double back into more generic dadsploitation territory, as if running for cover. Yet Thudarum benefits from being a South Indian film that isn't looking to pull its punches so as to earn a family-friendly certificate - beyond a certain point, it really does go hard indeed - and Moorthy gets all of this plot's pumps and pistons firing in a way very few contemporary thriller directors have managed: even when the film is roaring along at 90mph, leaving you clutching at the upholstery of your multiplex seat, you're always aware of just what a feat of engineering it is. This filmmaker picks his drivers and passengers well, too. As a Mohanlal vehicle, Thudarum gains in traction from following in the Lucifer movies' wake. There, his character had all the answers, and all of the cards at his disposal; yet for two-thirds of the new movie, until his tough-guy muscle memory kicks in, this Mohanlal is as powerless as Hank Fonda in The Wrong Man. Once he gets going, well, all the script's earlier talk about rogue pachyderms comes into terrifyingly sharp focus: if the thundering trumpets on the soundtrack don't alarm you, the look in the leading man's eye will. (It's a real heavyweight star turn.) Hitch would surely have adored Prakash Varma, a lauded ad director making his acting debut at 52, as the chuckling cop antagonist: begging for applause at his retirement do after taking extraordinary measures to frame our innocent hero, here is a rare modern movie villain worthy of a truly painful demise. Yet it's the car that has the best arc, first pride and joy, then prisoner, then a hearse, a crime scene, and finally an avenger's winged chariot. As with the wheels, so with the movie: what a ride.

Thudarum is now playing in selected cinemas.