Fifty-year-old Nandu (Parthipan) is a cinema financier. The director, who took money from him on interest, committed suicide with his wife because he could not repay it. The death became the talk of the media.
Believing Nandu to be the cause of the director’s suicide, his wife and daughter hate him and leave the house and disappear. The police chase to arrest financier Nandu.
Taking his pistol and leaving, Nandu hides in a once famous and now dilapidated ashram that is all too familiar to him. From there, he begins to narrate his life story, unbeknownst to the media, as recorded in ‘audio’ on his smart phone.
The story begins in 1971… We are introduced to Nandu as a six-month-old baby trying to drink milk from the corpse of his mother, who was murdered by her husband and lying in a pool of blood. , the story narrates how far his ‘shadow’ has chased him.
If the time of the story is contemporary, the story takes place in the same place, and the sequence of events is told in a straight line, it is called ‘simple narration’.
That is, the land and time that the characters travel through are different periods and places, and if the sequence of events is told in a forward-backward manner, it is called a ‘non-linear’ narrative.
Of these two, stories with simple narratives have been shot in one shot in many countries around the world. But seeing ‘Shadow of the Night’ with ‘I – Linear’ screenplay shot in a single shot, from the very first second till the last second the story unfolds unfolds on the screen as a mesmerizing screen experience.
First of all, we can praise director Parthipan for believing that such a ‘single shot’ film can be made.
The first 30 minutes of ‘Making’ footage, which narrates how the crew shot this one hour and 34 minute ‘single shot’ film, shows that Tamil cinema is no less than Hollywood in terms of imagination and technical mastery.
Nandu, who travels from Chennai to Andhra and from Andhra to Chennai, and the characters who come and go in his life and the marginal lives they face appear before us in flesh and blood in the narrative of old Nandu.
The introduction of most of Nandu’s age counterparts, the women who come into his life, supporting characters, and minor actors as newcomers helps to keep a close eye on the events of the story. Newcomer artists like Anantha Krishnan as 30-year-old Nandu, Sneha Kumar as Lakshmi and Brigada Sakha as Chilakamma are particularly impressive.
The continuation of the theater setting of the ruined ashram where the fifty-year-old Nandu is hiding, the story-telling technique of him appearing intermittently in ‘change overs’, the events and characters of the past unfolding before him with a ‘neo-noir’ character, says director Parthiban. RK Vijaymurugan’s art direction has helped it.
In Arthur A. Wilson’s cinematography, the technician (AK Akash) who wore the body-mounted camera on a ‘gimbal’ device, and the technicians (Sankaran D’Souza, Rajesh) who worked on the ‘focus puller’ to get the shots just right for him.
Rahman’s background music in enhancing the ‘shot by shot’ nature of the film, and his songs in evoking the core of the story and its emotions set the film high. The main character, who has only gone through ruins at various stages of life, rather than examining the flaws in the film, which tells its story as a ‘monologue’, can be admired for making such an impossible endeavor possible and surprising.