The film’s strengths lie in performance and craft. Its limitations stem from writing that cannot consistently support its ambition. Kara engages with complex emotional material, even if unevenly.

What Kara dishes out — after an overlong 161-minute runtime — is melodramatic fare that cannot make up its mind on what it wants to be.

A movie that began as a complex tale of morality, ended being happy to be called a message movie.

Kara is a film that deserved a better second half. Vignesh Raja has the ability, that much is clear.