There is a moment in Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai when a rat is given CPR. Yeah, you read this right. Someone presses its tiny chest, desperately trying to get it to breathe again. You see its tender chest compressing, expanding… In another film, this would be a ridiculous visual, a joke perhaps. In this film, it doesn’t. Because somehow director Ram establishes that its life matters. It’s hard to pin this film to a single idea, but if I had to, as a challenge, I might say: Love is eternal and so broad that it would be a pity to restrict it to a family, to a species, to a specific time even.

Soori’s character is the project this film takes on. This frightened, very ordinary man is desperate to return to his family after being away for a long time. This isn’t just Soori trying to create humour out of fear, though he certainly manages that from time to time… like when Nivin breaks into pure Tamil and Soori, without conviction, goes: “Vera level, bro”. But underneath these situational humour attempts is a serious man driven by serious emotional needs. He has a son. He has a family. He wants to survive. Isn’t that the most primal of all instincts for any living form?

Most films would turn this into a heroic quality. This one asks questions of it. What does it mean to care only about those who belong to us? Why is your child more important than somebody else’s? Why is a human life more valuable than another life form? And in any case, what does it even mean to own something in the first place? Perhaps that’s why Soori’s belongings slowly get stripped away from him. It begins with things and ends with a reinterpretation of fatherhood.

Perhaps this film’s most beautiful challenge to the idea of ownership comes from children finding… new mothers. This happens to a human child. This happens to a rat child. To adopt is perhaps one of the purest challenges to the idea of biological ownership, no? This child isn’t mine. It doesn’t carry my gene. And yet, I choose to care for it. These are grand ideas, and yes, this is a film born out of a grand premise: An immortal man who’s been living for more than 8,000 years is jolted awake by a mortal, a man who must feel like an infant to Nivin’s character. Perhaps that’s why this film itself begins as a fable being narrated to a child.

It’s bizarre, strange, and anything can happen in this fable. I think that’s why even AI-generated imagery, which has understandably bothered some, didn’t quite affect my immersion too much. Right from the first minute, it announces this artificial, storybook-like quality as you see artificial fireworks illuminate a train at night. I don’t think Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai is asking: “Do you believe this happened?” Instead, it seems to be asking: “Will you stay with me while I narrate this strange story?”

And by now, I’ve come to see that Ram’s films are, be patient with them or not, unique experiences. They can be angry, tender, eccentric, philosophical, sentimental and funny, sometimes within the same stretch. In fact, after Parandhu Po and Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai, I wonder if his cinema is beginning to reflect a childlike way of looking at the world. They seem to be interested in returning us to wonder, in recovering a way of looking at the world before hierarchies were methodically planted in our heads. Before ideas were drummed in. Like what’s important and unimportant. Like what’s possible and impossible. Like what’s mine and yours.

In this film, at some point, a child is dead… from starvation. There is something haunting about this. Perhaps Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai is also, in some abstract way, about the death of childhood and the attempt to reclaim it? Maybe that’s why a bedtime-story form feels so appropriate. You grow up and learn how the world works. And then perhaps, if you’re lucky, you spend some part of adulthood trying to recover everything this knowledge took away from you.

I think for that reason, a train is a pretty setting for such a story. Much of this film happens inside one, and yet, I never felt claustrophobic. I don’t remember Ram relying on aerial shots of the train to manufacture scale either. I remember thinking that the compartments felt airy, almost expansive, like an unusually empty train compartment really can. There is room to move, to fight, to chase. The sound design is pretty terrific work. I barely heard the chug of the train after a few minutes, and in fact, it got conspicuous only when it stopped. When Soori’s character gets thrown out, suddenly you hear dangerous whooshes of wind. Suddenly, the outside feels frightening. These are small sensory choices, but effective ones.

There are beautiful images too. Fireworks reflected in glasses. Faces framed by train windows. But my favourite stretch of Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai comes later, near the waters of Rameswaram. There is a languidness to this portion that I enjoyed gazing at. The landscape feels dry. Life seems almost static. There are some men: different ages, different bodies, different faces. And then a woman arrives on a bicycle. And with the score, it really feels like life has entered the frame, and even the film.

Anjali’s character seems to have this effect on the film. There is an intriguing moment here involving a man whose gaze initially seems lustful, and what she does seems almost to purge him of it. Across Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai, I thought there seemed to be this idea of the feminine being associated with nurturing, renewal and the continuation of life. In this Rameswaram stretch, this quality becomes almost abstract. The woman on the bicycle isn’t simply the object of Nivin’s centuries-long desire. She feels, momentarily, like an elemental force entering this barren world.

But yes, there is a love story here as well. Yes, yet another idea. What does love even mean when you have lived for more than 8,000 years? Nivin’s character has seen enough of humankind to become deeply cynical and angry about all of us. He has presumably seen every variety of cruelty repeat itself. Civilisations have come and gone. Entire families have come and gone. And yet, strangely, this ancient man still remains almost impossibly hopeful about love, about her. He keeps looking. Perhaps the romantic idea here isn’t that love lasts forever. Is the film suggesting that longing lasts longer? Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai isn’t the kind of film to spell out answers to such questions.

It’s a hopeful world in that sense, but one in which cruelty unfurls. A child dies. A rat dies. Death happens. Separation happens: to rats, and humans. But so long as somebody chooses to nurture another life, something, in some form, continues. And that’s why I think of that rat receiving CPR. We could discuss what it means, but I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you exactly what I felt about it. In fact, if you asked me what Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai is about, I might struggle to explain it. There is an immortal man, a frightened man trying to return to his family, a woman on a bicycle, a dead child, a rat, trains, dreams, memories, desire, motherhood, cruelty and kindness. I’d go on. Some ideas connect, some float around. But you know what? It’s all right.

In between all our solving, all our explaining, here’s a film that seems to invite us to get on a train and just travel along,. Sometimes, it’s nice just to listen and look out of the window.