vijay’s farewell movie, Jan Nayganhas given fans everything they wanted – the punchy dialogue, the mass entrance, the 33-year-old victory lap. but somewhere in between Jan NayganDirector H Vinoth stages a scene that has nothing to do with celebration and everything to do with farce: a child is kidnapped, raped, and her body is dumped on the road, naked, from a moving car.

In Jan NayganActor Raichal Rebecca Ki Porkodi is mourning the death of her husband, who died after drinking illicit liquor. She sits on a hunger strike and protests against a system that does not take accountability. The Battle of Porkodi was not invented out of thin air. Deaths due to illicit liquor are real in Tamil Nadu and have made headlines in the past.

The politician, desperate to break Porkodi’s resistance, orders his men to kidnap his daughter, sexually assault her, and kill her. The impulse to depict sexual violence is not the problem. The problem is what the camera wants to stay on and what it wants to look away from.

Ask yourself this: In that whole sequence, how much time do we spend with the men who commit the crimes? And how much time do we waste on Porkodi’s grief – his hands closing over his daughter’s bloodied, naked body, her screams, her fall? This entire sequence lasts for barely 15 minutes. But, Vinoth does not commit any act of violence here. He pretends to watch. The child’s abused body becomes visual evidence of the politician’s cruelty, and Porkodi’s devastation becomes the emotional currency that the film capitalizes on so that Thalapathy can later have its hero. His suffering is not the subject. This is the setup.

It ends with Thalapathy declaring that he will be an ally of women – one of his election promises which was cleverly incorporated into the film which is about leader Vijay.

This isn’t new, and that’s exactly the point. Directed by Vetri Maran Vada Chennai The prison scenes and relatively clean escapes survived because the violence there was presented as systemic cruelty, not heart-wrenching shock. but the rich ParuthiveeranVijay Sethupathi’s KingRajinikanth’s Vettaiyaan – All of them (and more) have, at some point, reached for the same depiction: put the attack on screen in such detail that the audience gasps, gets agitated, and calls it social commentary.

Jan Naygan Doesn’t extend the same compassion to his own child character.

And here’s the part that will really make you uncomfortable. After the child dies, after being thrown out on the road, Prakash Raj’s Roza Rangaswami doesn’t just rejoice – she reduces his death to a comment about her son’s satisfaction: “If he had cooperated, he would have been alive by now.” The movie wants you to hate him for this line. Fair enough. But for that you have to listen to that line in its entirety, in detail, which is spoken almost casually, before it brings to you the moment where Thalapathy is stabbing his son. The rape and murder of the girl, narratively, exists to create your hunger for revenge. That is not restraint. This is a director calculating exactly how much horror is required to make the audience happy enough to get stabbed twenty minutes later.

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So what would moderation actually look like? It feels like keeping the attack off-screen and letting its consequences tell the story – a torn uniform, a silence, a mother’s face, before we even see what she’s seeing. It looks like Porcodi’s daughter is being given some respect before she becomes the lifeless body we are shown. It looks like a camera that lingers on the men giving orders for once, so the inconvenience sits with the criminals, not the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) blurring the memory of a child’s exposed body in front of the audience.

This sequence could have expressed the same outrage without depicting the child’s body. The audience would still understand the magnitude of the crime. In fact, it might have been even more powerful because its focus would have been on the violence perpetrated, not on the victim’s body.

Sexual violence is not a show. This is not the high point for the hero. This isn’t something that needs to be made more graphic to prove just how evil a villain is.

2026 should still not be the year Tamil cinema needs to explain itself. The question now is not whether cinema should depict sexual violence or not. This absolutely can happen, and sometimes it should happen. The question is how she chooses to portray it.

Because the camera always chooses.

And for too long, that option has been to be with the woman who is the victim rather than the men who commit the crimes. that’s exactly it Jan Naygan goes wrong. It had a real, urgent story to tell about power and justice. It didn’t take a naked, blood-soaked child thrown from a car to illustrate this point. It required the courage to trust the audience less and still make them feel everything.