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Iraivan
Image via Red Giant Movies

An unflinching action thriller pulverized by critics and left for dead at the box office hunts down a psychopathic serial killer on Netflix’s Top 10

Not exactly showered in praise, but still a hit.

It doesn’t matter how good or bad it is, any action thriller welcomed onto the Netflix content library is going to draw in at least a decent number of curious subscribers, even if Iraivan isn’t going to be remembered as one of the best by any stretch of the imagination.

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Writer and director I. Ahmed’s Tamil-language movie does tick a lot of boxes that the platform’s customer base often finds irresistible, though, seeing as it’s an intense and atmospheric hard-boiled genre film predicated on a rogue hero’s unquenchable thirst to track down and apprehend a psychopathic serial murderer.

Iraivan
Image via Red Giant Movies

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Iraivan has cracked Netflix’s worldwide Top 10 after debuting in eighth position following its recent addition (per FlixPatrol), but that doesn’t cover up the fact it was a creative, critical, and commercial flop after hitting theaters in its home nation in September of this year.

Paying audiences weren’t interested in the slightest to discover the outcome of Jayam Ravi’s grizzled cop Arjun making it his mission to put a stop to the spate of killings carried out by the so-called “Smiley Man,” with Iraivan failing to even recoup a quarter of its production budget at the box office in the face of negative reviews.

At the end of the day we’re still talking about a dark and dingy story revolving around a serial killer, so it was borderline inevitable that even a dud so fresh in the memory would find itself gaining a new lease of life the second it migrated over to Netflix.


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