Debutant director Pramod Sundhar’s Kaliyugam in Tamil is an ambitious but depleted exhausting, dreary dystopian drama set in 2064 when the world order has collapsed. It tries hard to be an indigenous version of Mad Max, Blade Runner and Hunger Games, but ends up being a pale shadow of its own ambitions.

Brutality is shown to be a way of life, and soldiers calling themselves ‘liberators’ stalk the severe scenario, killing civilians who have nothing to lose except their thirst and hunger. Heads being blown off seems a favourite way to shock us. After a while, an immunity and boredom set in. We couldn’t care less what happens to these characters.

In theory, this may sound something interesting and pathbreaking. But Kaliyugam comes nowhere close. It is arid and unfurnished, more like an amateur film school take on a post-apocalyptic world than an actual well defined cinematic experience.

The film is shot in a fading yellow colour palate suggesting a world whipped down by greed and insensitivity. However, there is no tangible effort to portray the battle of the haves and have-nots in any kind of intelligible light.

Characters on the run have their heads blown off suddenly, though not shockingly: brutality works when it is shown to be a means to bring the good characters down to their knees, only to have them rise at the end in a collective act of rebellion.

There is no payoff in Kaliyugam. It all seems like vacant self-indulgence. The director’s vision is manifested in welters of nothingness. The most we can praise is the sets replicating ruin. Characters come and go without registering beyond a floating atom in the erratic pattern of things.

Still, Shraddha Srinath makes some impact. She seems committed far beyond what the script demands. She is the oasis of hope in a sea of nullity. Kishore plays a sketchy character named Sketch who finds temporary reprieve from hunger and impending death in a “safe house” run by a man who seems more sinister than hospitable.

Such unreliable characters populate this sterile futuristic drama of doom that tells us nothing about the future, except that films such as this would cease to exist in the times to come, as mankind would have hopefully evolved minds with no patience for tedious, clumsy innovations.