Velu Naicker, who witnesses the brutal murder of his father, kills a corrupt policeman and escapes to Mumbai, only to become a gangster.
Ratings
Curator score: 9.5/10
IMDb: 8.6/10
TMDB: 7.8/10
Director
Mani Ratnam
Production
Sujatha Films, Muktha Films
Cast
Kamal Haasan, Saranya Ponvannan, Karthika, Janagaraj, Delhi Ganesh, Nizhalgal Ravi, Nassar, Tinnu Anand, Vijayan, M. V. Vasudeva Rao, Tara, Babitha, Kuyili, Neena, R. N. Sudarshan, R. N. K. Prasad, R. N. Jayagopal, Pradeep Shakti, A. R. Srinivasan, Kitty
Curator Review
Verdict
A landmark gangster drama with real emotional weight, Nayakan blends underworld rise-and-fall storytelling with family tragedy, political corruption, and a deeply human lead performance. It’s stylish, mournful, and morally complicated, with craft that still feels major decades later.
Best for
fans of epic crime dramas
viewers who like morally gray antiheroes
people interested in Indian cinema classics
audiences drawn to tragic rise-and-fall stories
fans of strong visual style and memorable music
Skip if
you want a fast, plot-first crime thriller
you dislike melodrama or heightened emotion
you prefer clean moral boundaries
you are looking for a light or purely action-driven gangster film
Overview
Nayakan is one of those gangster films that feels larger than its genre. It begins with personal trauma and expands into a portrait of a man who becomes a folk hero, a criminal, and a casualty of the world that made him. The emotional pull comes from how seriously it treats family, loyalty, and the cost of survival.
Worth noting
Mani Ratnam stages the rise of Velu Naicker with confidence and restraint, letting the film move across years without losing its tragic center. The performances, cinematography, and music give it a classic, almost mythic texture, while the corruption around the protagonist keeps the story grounded in social reality.
Bottom line
What lingers most is the film’s moral ambiguity. It never fully excuses Velu, but it understands why people follow him and why his violence feels inseparable from the injustice around him. That tension is what makes the film endure: it is both a gangster epic and a lament for a broken system.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Michael James (5★) · 313 likes
Even after all these years, this epic gangster drama provides an engrossing experience, thanks to the brilliant writing-execution of Mani Ratnam and a spellbinding performance from Kamalhassan. The story is said to be loosely based on Mumbai's underworld kingpin Varadarajan Mudaliar and is narrated through different time slices of his life. It deservingly featured in Time Magazine’s 100 Best Films of All Time.
The movie is technically exceptional. Be it balakumaran’s iconic dialogues, P.C.Sreeram’s cinematography or ilayaraja’s bgm, it stands… more
Preet (5★) · 274 likes
justice didn’t live there, so he became it
nrh (5★) · 214 likes
a child slides down a mountain of sand into the arms of the police, and two betrayals (a child by the law, a father by his son) and two murders emerge, setting off a fugue like nightmare of recurrent events in twinned patterns of betrayal and retaliation, repeated like the endless refrain of "thenpandi cheemayile" until cause and effect blur and change, and two young men (mani and kamal) confront the great fear of looking back on your life and wondering if your legacy is doomed to be lost, or if it was all poison anyway.
Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine (4★) · 199 likes
A PASSAGE TO INDIA II: ATTACK OF THE SPICE
Another grand epic crime drama about a man raising and rising out of the slums to become a powerful don, a fearful man of crime but that slowly starts to wrestle with his own demons as the violence he inflicts starts to take a toll when twists and turns start to happen in his life. Apparently The Godfather was an influence in this film and you can clearly see that, like… more
Ayush (4★) · 188 likes
Mani Ratnam's grand bildungsroman set against a corrupt and decaying India where the rich get richer and the poor are treated like scum. From the very beginning, a cycle of murdered fathers and the consequential acts of revenge by their rage-filled sons defines the eternal blazes of vengeance engulfing Nayakan.
Through sheer will and courage, Velu Naicker earns the respect of his people. They worship him to the point of dying for him, and that's entirely because they have seen… more