Oru Naal Iravil 2015

Sekar [Sathyaraj] is an NRI working in Singapore who returns to his Chennai hometown when his contract ends. He soon faces worries about his daughter, who rides a bike with a male classmate, and his fear that she might stray from the right path leads him to push for an early arranged marriage for her and a premature end to her college education. Back home, he has a piece of commercial property near his house that he rents out to various stores, with one garage left empty. Because he’s around again, he and a group of old friends gather each night in that space to share a few pegs and reminisce about the old days. Among these friends is Suri, a young auto rickshaw driver with a quick smile and a stubborn streak.

Around the same time, Sethu [Sethu] is a struggling former film director who has just seen a script he wrote finally approved by a producer. The excitement is tempered by the reality of his precarious career, and fate complicates things when his bag is accidentally left behind in Suri’s rickshaw. The coincidence sets off a chain of events that pulls several lives into close, intimate proximity in the city’s everyday spaces—the garage near Sekar’s home becomes a stage for fate rather than a mere storage.

To lift Sekar’s spirits after a family argument over his daughter’s engagement and education, Suri arranges for a rendezvous with a call girl in the unoccupied garage beside Sekar’s house. It’s a discreet plan meant to avoid public embarrassment and give him a moment of relief. While the trio heads out for a quick bite, Suri bumps into Sethu, who is desperate to recover the bag and the script it contains. As they hurry to retrieve the bag, Suri is unexpectedly arrested for driving under the influence and stuck at the police station for the night, leaving Sekar and the call girl alone in the garage for two tense days and nights.

In those quiet, tense hours, Sekar and the call girl develop a fragile, uneasy rapport. Sekar negotiates with her not to reveal their presence, fearing moral judgment and scandal that could ripple through his family life. The call girl opens up about her own struggles: she was forced to abandon college after marriage, and after her husband left, she had to become a prostitute to support her daughter. Her world is complicated by a single, distant friend who could help in emergencies, a friend who remains unreachable because he doesn’t know she is a call girl. The call girl notices the bag with the script in the garage and, moved by the vulnerability and need she observes, decides to take it—an act that will have repercussions well beyond the moment.

Outside, Sekar’s friends chatter and reveal that one of them harbors ill intentions toward him, a detail that intensifies the sense of danger surrounding the hidden occupants of the garage. When Suri is finally released and arrives to retrieve Sekar, the call girl has already departed, leaving a message for him to call her by the name she adopts in that fragile moment: Thangam [Thangam]. The next turn of the tale comes when Suri carries the now-missing bag back to Sethu, who is stunned to discover that the script has vanished, its fate now tied to the improvised drama unfolding in the garage.

Back home, Sekar is greeted by a family that has learned the truth in roundsabout ways. His daughter had, in fact, arranged for a friend to unlock the garage, and she has realized the truth but chooses to protect her father by lying about her own circumstances. The family’s crisis prompts a decisive shift: following Thangam’s advice, Sekar calls off the engagement and allows his daughter to continue her education, signaling a break from old patterns of control and a movement toward new possibilities for her future.

In a surprising turn, Thangam seeks out her only friend, who turns out to be Sethu. She returns the script to him, not realizing it was originally his work, and the moment feels like a curious full-circle. This encounter sparks a transformation in Sethu, who decides to rewrite the very script he had once sent out for production. He chooses to take up the director’s chair once more, now inspired by the unintended consequences of a chance encounter and the real-life drama that has given his story an unexpected ending—and a new beginning for the people around him.