The first Indian hard sci-fi movie was of Tamil Origin; in that context, the Tamil sci-fi scene moving towards a more mass-y, typical action adventure approach with entries like Endhiran and 24 in later years might feel strange to genre viewers. With the advent of OTT platforms, much like other Indian movie industries, Kollywood received greater freedom in introducing and experimenting with new stories without having to shoehorn the age-old mass movie treatment—and a reflection of this changed stance was seen in theatrical releases as well. Director KG Balasubramani’s latest mind-bending sci-fi thriller, Black, streaming on Amazon Prime, is a testament to the fact that the Tamil movie industry has taken a step in the right direction after all.
Using minimal characters, evoking atmospheric dread with creative use of settings, and with an inspired cinematography coupled with chilling background scores, Black plays all the beats right to build effective tension and suspense. The effort is ambitious enough to overlook some of the slip-ups where commercial movie stereotypes nearly sneaked into the narrative. Nevertheless, the success of Black will definitely inspire Indian filmmakers to go bold with mainstream releases as well.
Spoilers Ahead
Deaths in the Past
Black opens on a rare Supermoon event in 1964 as Manohar, son of a local businessman in Uppalapakkam, Chennai, drives his two friends, eloping couple Ganesh and Lalitha, to his family beach house. Lalitha is pregnant with Ganesh’s child, and as her family doesn’t approve of their relationship, she and Ganesh have decided to go on the run. Manohar is supportive towards his friends but secretly holds a grudge against Lalitha, whom he fell for during college days, and still hasn’t gotten over her rejection. On their way, their car gets temporarily blocked by a motor van carrying an angel statue to a nearby church, and has gotten stuck in the mud. Upon reaching the vacant, stately beach house, Manohar guides the couple to their room and sulks alone while getting drunk, blaming Lalitha for returning to his life. In his drunken delirium, Manohar goes to his car to grab a gun, with the intention to kill both of his friends—but gets temporarily distracted by a piercing, sharp noise coming from the dark depth of the road. As Manohar decides to go check out the source of the noise—he crosses a pitch-dark patch of the road, and hearing a couple of gunshot noises—he hurriedly returns to the beach house, once again crossing the patch in the process. Manohar is shocked to find his friends murdered, and with his last breath, Ganesh blames Manohar for their tragic demise. Taking notice of the assailant running away, Manohar gives chase, and as he catches a brief glimpse of him, Manohar is dumbfounded to see himself as the killer. The killer escapes, and Manohar is convicted for a crime he considered but didn’t commit.
Vasanth and Aranya’s Rocky Marriage
The narrative moves to sixty years later, as married couple Vasanth and Aranya come to focus. Vasanth’s workaholic nature and hot-headed tendencies have caused a minor rift in their seven-year marriage, and Aranya shares her concerns with her best friend, Prabha, who reassures her about Vasanth. As Vasanth and Aranya take their friends to a nightclub, Vasanth gets into a scuffle with a guy who was trying to harass Prabha. As the couple make their way home, the harasser and his friend try to threaten them by breaking the windshield of their car. Aranya is annoyed by the fact that despite being married for so long, Vasanth isn’t mature enough to prioritize his wife’s security instead of picking a fight with a random stranger.
To make amends with Aranya, Vasanth agrees to take a long overdue vacation to a beach-township complex at Uppalapakkam, where they recently bought a house. On their way, they come across the same angel statue—now posited at the crossroads in the outskirts of the township—as it is revealed later that due to unknown circumstances it couldn’t be moved from the place since that particular night, and the church authorities decided to erect the statue right there, considering it to be divine intervention. Vasanth sees Manohar’s antique car while passing by the statue and is overwhelmed by a sensation of déjà vu as past events start flashing in his mind’s eye. It should be mentioned at this point that the particular day when the couple move in to their beach house is also the exact day when the rare Supermoon event occurs, exactly sixty years after the events in 1964.
After settling in at their beach house, one of many identical row houses in the complex, the couple leaves for a bit to shop at the local supermarket, where they come across the harasser and his friend from the previous night, who seem to be apologetic for their past actions. However, Vasanth isn’t in a forgiving mood, and he decides to get even by wrecking their bike. Even though Aranya initially doesn’t approve of his actions, later she reveals she wanted him to settle the score with the harassers as well.
Trapped in Timelines
Upon returning to their beach house, the couple starts facing a series of inexplicable events, which prompts them to question the nature of their reality. The township appears vacant, with the security missing, and someone unknown seems to have gifted them a painting. Vasanth texts one of his friends, whom he suspects to have delivered it, but gets surprised to see him at his doorstep—annoyed by the fact that Vasanth called him to arrive late at night, even though Vasanth never called him to begin with. After his departure, the couple get cozy when a blackout occurs in the township, and as they restore the peace by going outside to switch on backup supply, Aranya notices someone keeping a watch over them. Unable to find anyone, the couple return to their room and notice someone has moved into the house opposite to theirs—which is strange given that they were the only residents in the complex. In the context of recent events, the couple is curious enough to peep through the windows of the house, where they get shocked to find a version of themselves as the new residents. Freaked out, they return to their home to realize that whatever they saw is happening with them in real time—and they were seeing time-displaced versions of themselves. Efforts to leave the township fail, and they find them getting stuck on an inescapable spatial loop on a dark patch in between two houses. The patch is the same as the 1964 version, and they hear a sharp, high-pitched noise similar to what Manohar experienced all those years ago. After returning to their house, the couple finds even the interior of their house has been altered. Aranya calls the authorities for help, but the signal gets distorted in the middle of the call. They try to communicate with their time-displaced selves, and all of a sudden, a version of Vasanth enters their house and attacks Prime Vasanth (the main one whom the story focuses on), but Aranya manages to fend him off. The couple begin to discuss multiple nefarious possibilities—like an elaborate prank by the harassers or experiencing hallucinations in an intoxicated state—hover in Vasanth’s mind until he comes up with a theory. They have been witnessing themselves across several different timelines in the past and present, and every time they pass through the dark patch outside their house, they reach a new one. In one iteration, Vasanth sees a troubling imminent future, where his future self hurts Aranya in the heat of the moment—and he becomes desperate to avoid that future.
Taking Aranya with him, Vasanth tries to jump to a different timeline to avert the future, but things go terribly bad when they come across an alternate timeline’s version of Vasanth secretly speaking with Prabha, and Aranya assumes that her husband and best friend were cheating on her. Aggrieved, Aranya leaves Vasanth and steps inside the dark patch—and while doing so, gets separated from him as the duo get stranded in two different timelines.
Parallel Reality in the Film
Vasanth is at a loss when authorities arrive at the housing complex, responding to the call Aranya made previously, and to make Vasanth’s condition even more miserable, all the inexplicable occurrences have suddenly stopped. He is suspected to be responsible for Aranya’s sudden disappearance and brought to the local police station. Desperate to find his wife, Vasanth creates a scene by thrashing the cops and escaping in his car to return to the township, and this time, when he passes the angel statue, he sees Manohar’s vintage car making a turn at the crossroads. Guided by strange intuitive feelings, Vasanth follows him and meets a much older Manohar, who listens to Vasanth’s plight and is able to relate to him as he himself experienced something similar sixty years ago. Through all these years, Manohar has excessively researched this phenomenon, as being a victim of injustice, the drive to prove his innocence—at least to himself—guided him in exploring the inexplicable.
Manohar explains that the housing complex, which is the same location where Manohar’s beach house was before, used to be a secret lab during the pre-independence era where the British used to conduct unknown experiments. The lab was abandoned after an accident, which happened in 1941, and whatever occurred during that period made the place susceptible to strange cosmic entanglement, particularly the one initiated by the occurrence of the supermoon event, which takes place every sixty years. The black patch at the site turns into a wormhole—a gateway to parallel realities. Manohar explains the concept of parallel realities through quantum superposition: there are multiple, infinite realities that exist in the same plane of existence as our own, which are the same yet altered to some extent as compared to our reality. Contrary to the preconceived notion about time-travel, Manohar opines that the flow of time is not linear like a flowing river; instead, it is branched into different realities depending on alteration in situations and decisions of every kind. In a regular situation, one can perceive the reality of their own, but the particular cosmic connection the housing complex shares with a Supermoon event results in the creation of a wormhole in the site, which can provide access to multiple parallel realities—for as long as the Supermoon maintains its formation. This is actually not so far-fetched, as it has been historically documented that cosmic events alter earth’s geomagnetic energies. For example, Halley’s Comet, which passes by earth every 72–80 years, is associated with movements of monoliths, gravitational field disruption, shifts in tidal waves, and so on and so forth. Manohar reveals that in a possible parallel reality, they might have had this conversation already, or that Aranya might have been approached in some reality instead of Vasanth. The significance of the angel statue is not explained, but in all probability it probably acted as a threshold to the strange area where time, space, and reality distort during the Supermoon.
However, Vasanth is more interested in reuniting with his wife instead of listening to Manohar’s nerdy jargon, and Manohar instructs him to find his wife by moving through parallel realities. But reminds him at the same time that he is on a time crunch, as a change in the cosmic position of Supermoon will result in the wormhole getting closed for another sixty years. In case he isn’t able to find his Aranya during that time, Manohar insinuates that he will take the place of Vasanth from another reality.
Did Prime Vasanth Find His Wife?
During Black’s climax, Vasanth returns to the township once again and manages to evade the cops, who were already waiting for him. Vasanth begins hopping through parallel realities in search of Prime Aranya (original narrative version), and as he watches all the versions of himself and Aranya in different realities, he learns that his wife was about to surprise him with news of her pregnancy—before everything went down the gutter due to this cosmic entanglement and their personal miscommunication. Vasanth is taken aback by the emotional whiplash and becomes really desperate to reunite with Aranya—to such an extent that he enters the house of a different reality’s Vasanth and beats him up—recreating the same scenario shown earlier in the movie. In a sense, his future parallel reality version was responsible for the actions that spooked the couple in the first place.
Finally, much to Vasanth’s delight, he is able to reunite with Aranya, presumably the prime version, as she arrives at the township with the cops. As the couple reunite, a relieved Aranya seems to have forgiven Vasanth for cheating on her—but as Vasanth drives away from the housing complex, he realizes that she is a past timeline version of Aranya who was separated from his past version during the power blackout—as that version of Vasanth might have stepped into the dark patch alone. Prime Vasanth realizes that she is not his wife but decides not to reveal anything to her. Probably because this version of Aranya doesn’t suspect him of having an extramarital affair, and he has a much better chance of patching up his relationship with her as a result. It remains unknown as to what happened with Prime Aranya, who probably continued her search for Prime Vasanth—to no avail.
In Black’s ending, Prime Vasanth is shown to have stopped to take a leak at a gas station when another version of him approaches him in the restroom—and closes the door. This version is probably one who failed to find his wife as well, and adhering to Manohar’s advice, is now willing to kill and replace a different reality’s version of him. Manohar himself was a victim of such fate, as an alternate reality version of him committed a crime in his reality for which he suffered for a lifetime. As Vasanth returns from the restroom and begins driving, Aranya asks him whether everything is alright. Replying to her, he shares a smirk, and until the very end, it remains unknown as to which version of Vasanth ended up with her. It might either be the killer or Prime Vasanth, depending upon the interpretation of the viewers.
Which Version Of Vasanth Survived At The End?
There was a reason as to why the director had time and again highlighted Vasanth’s tendency to resort to violence. Through all the time-travel, parallel reality mumbo-jumbo, one thing which the director wanted to convey is the self-destructive tendencies of human beings, or in this case of men – who are too eager to opt for brawn instead of brain in their attempt to tackle a situation. Manohar had the sinister intention to kill Lalitha and her lover, simply because he couldn’t deal with the rejection, and paid an ultimate price by getting framed for a crime which his murderous version had committed. Like Manohar, Vashant too believes in adhering to his baser instincts even when there is a way to settle things in a better way. He prioritized provoking the harassers, without giving a thought to his wife’s security, and throughout his stay at the beach house complex, he faced the deep seated darker instincts within him which put his wife in grave peril. I think the final version of Vasanth, whom Prime Vasanth meets, is the one who was shown to have hurt Aranya – and to avert that future, Prime Vasanth was desperate to jump to another timeline along with his wife. In this context, Prime Vasanth getting killed by a darker, violent version of himself will create a sense of poetic justice – as he faces the comeuppance and realizes he himself was his worst enemy.
