Director Arun Matheswaran's DC, starring Lokesh Kanagaraj and Wamiqa Gabbi, didn't arrive in a vacuum.
advertisementThis wasn't Anirudh scoring a hero worship vehicle where the music had to announce the star before the star even appeared.
The violence in DC could easily have become exhausting, but Anirudh's music gave it rhythm and personality.
That range is what made the music stand out — Anirudh wasn't relying on the same sonic language to sell every high point.
There is something almost old-school about the way DC has turned around since its release on August 7.
Director Arun Matheswaran's DC, starring Lokesh Kanagaraj and Wamiqa Gabbi, didn't arrive in a vacuum. There was the usual countdown, a trailer, and the familiar release-week promotional blitz. What it lacked, however, was something harder to create: goodwill.
Fivedays after its release, DC has crossed Rs 50 crore globally and earned overwhelming reviews. Behind that turnaround are four people who each had something to prove – a director who knew exactly what he wanted, a director-turned-actor willing to gamble his credibility on an uncertain role, a female actor who had waited nearly 20 years for her breakthrough, and a composer looking to break free from the loop of larger-than-life commercial entertainers.
Read Full Story
Director Arun Matheswaran was fielding his own share of criticism over his last few outings. Director-turned-actor Lokesh Kanagaraj was still carrying the baggage of Vijay-starrer Leo and the backlash around Rajinikanth's Coolie — two projects that had chipped away at the sense of him as an unimpeachable hitmaker. Wamiqa Gabbi, meanwhile, was hardly entering the film with the weight of a proven box-office draw behind her, despite years of strong work. Anirudh Ravichander, too, had been caught in a familiar cycle of larger-than-life commercial entertainers, making DC an opportunity to step outside the sound he had come to be associated with.
None of them entered DC with the luxury of certainty. And perhaps that is precisely what made the gamble work. Now, the film is being showered with praise from all quarters and the contributions of each of them made this worthwhile.
The director who knew exactly what he was making
Let's look at Arun Matheswaran's filmography and this stops feeling like a fluke. Rocky, Saani Kaayidham, Captain Miller, and now DC — all of his creations have recurring themes: violence, grief, people who got shoved to the margins and had to survive there. What's different this time is how he made DC accessible to a wider audience. He's taken all his usual obsessions and dressed them up in a much more familiar revenge-thriller shape, with Lokesh Kanagaraj's Devadas on the run for life.
You can see the same discipline in how he handles the violence and visuals. DC is A-rated, and none of it feels gratuitous — the blood isn't there for shock value, it's how the film talks about trauma, what survival actually costs and how the system doesn't let the oppressed lead a life. He lets the camera sit in the aftermath instead of cutting away, which is a director's decision, not a star's. It's still very much his film as much as the performers and technicians'. He just built this version of it to survive an audience that had every reason to walk in unconvinced. Director Arun Matheswaran. (Photo credit: Instagram/sunpictures, @pc.stunts.prabu_)
The actor who bet on himself
That same discipline is what made Lokesh Kanagaraj's gamble pay off. Think about it — a director this famous, deciding to headline his own film right after a string of criticised work? That could have gone wrong very fast. It had “vanity project” written all over it before a single frame was shot. Instead, he played Devadas with incredible restraint. And that turns out to be the smartest thing he could have done, because it left room. He didn't hog the film the way you'd expect a filmmaker-turned-actor to. The people around him — the women in his life, the violence trailing him — actually got their moments instead of everything bending around him.
That's a harder call than it sounds, especially when you're the industry's most-watched director trying your hand at acting for the first time. Coming off the Coolie backlash, Lokesh had spent the better part of the last year as a target of incessant online trolling. The easy move would've been to write himself a big, unmissable showcase. He didn't. Instead, he lets the film breathe — and that restraint is exactly what opens the door for the performance everyone's actually walking out talking about. Lokesh Kanagaraj in DC.
advertisement
The female actor who finally got her due
Another inseparable part of DC who made the film unforgettable was Wamiqa Gabbi as Chandra. She has been on-screen since she was a kid — she played Kareena Kapoor's little sister in Jab We Met back in 2007. That's nearly twenty years spent building a career one language at a time, in Punjabi, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam. And she's had real wins along the way — Jubilee got her acclaim, Khufiya got her a Filmfare OTT award. But those were prestige, streaming-sized wins. DC was a completely different project that screamed mass, big-screen, and pan-India.
What made the moment land harder is that Chandra wasn't introduced merely as an instrument of Devadas' story. She arrived with her own history, her own anger and, eventually, her own reckoning. Gabbi didn't have the luxury of a long runway before the character takes over the film; she had to establish all of that through fragments, silences and a performance that relies heavily on her eyes. By the time Chandra exploded, the audience understood why. The catharsis worked because Gabbi did the quieter work first.
advertisement
She earned it in one scene. Gabbi's Chandra let out a cathartic scream after killing a character who wronged her. The entire sequence played like something out of Kill Bill — right down to the way the interiors and the colour palette turn violence into something closer to aesthetic choreography. It was the kind of scene a theatre didn't just watch quietly. People whistled and clapped. That's where word-of-mouth is actually created.
Nineteen years is a long wait for a scene like this. And how she made it count!
The composer who needed to step out of the noise
And holding them all by lending his shoulder was composer Anirudh Ravichander's thumping and pulsating music. He has spent years making films feel bigger than they are. His music has become almost synonymous with the contemporary Tamil mass film — booming bass, instantly recognisable hooks, whistle-ready themes and scores designed to turn a star entrance into an event. At some point, though, that strength began to feel like a formula. DC gave him something different to play with.
advertisement
This wasn't Anirudh scoring a hero worship vehicle where the music had to announce the star before the star even appeared. Arun Matheswaran's world was darker, stranger and more emotionally bruised. So Anirudh got to move between classical influences, rock, folk and country without having to constantly chase the next mass high. The score didn't simply tell you when to cheer; it sat inside the characters' grief, rage and loneliness.
That was particularly evident in the film's action. The violence in DC could easily have become exhausting, but Anirudh's music gave it rhythm and personality. He knew when to push a sequence into overdrive and, just as importantly, when to pull back. One fight sequence used the Raga of Revenge, blending classical sounds with the film's brutal action, while another pivotal episode shifted gears entirely with an English song. That range is what made the music stand out — Anirudh wasn't relying on the same sonic language to sell every high point. Some of DC's most effective moments landed not just because of what was happening on screen, but because of what he was doing underneath it.
And perhaps that was the most interesting part of his work in DC. He wasn't trying to prove that he could make a mass film louder. He was proving that he could make one feel different. In a film where Arun's visual language, Lokesh's restraint and Wamiqa's explosive performance were all fighting for attention, Anirudh found a way to amplify them without swallowing them. For a composer who has spent years being the sound of spectacle, DC felt like a reminder of just how much he could do when the spectacle wasn't the only thing he was being asked to create.
There is something almost old-school about the way DC has turned around since its release on August 7. No carefully manufactured pre-release frenzy, no overwhelming goodwill, no promise that it would be the next big thing. Just a film that arrived, found its audience and gave them enough to talk about. In an age where the conversation around a film often peaks before release, DC has managed something far more valuable – it has made the conversation begin after the lights go down.
- Ends
