Thuglaq Darbar is a political drama directed by Delhiprasad Deenadayalan with screenplay and dialogues written by Balaji Tharaneetharan. It has Vijay Sethupathi, Radhakrishnan Parthiepan and Raashi Khanna in the lead roles, and Manjima Mohan, Karunakaran, Bagavathi Perumal among others in supporting roles. The film is produced by SS Lalit Kumar under the banner Seven Screen Studios. 

Vijay Sethupathi plays the role of Singaravelan, fondly known as Singam. He suffers from a split personality disorder of sorts after being attacked in an alcohol party. How he manages to rise among the ranks in Rayappan's (Parthiepan) political party and how he gains the trust of the people in his locality, despite the disorder forms the plot of the film.

It's tough to decide where to start writing about this film. Should we begin with the screenplay, or the chemistry between Vijay Sethupathi and Parthiepan or Govind Vasantha's music? The choices are plenty in number, but fortunately the film doesn't suffer from any such confusion. 

The film opens with a simple flashback, and then on the story progresses in a linear manner, and it only gets better with every scene. There might be occasional blips here and there but it's not much of a concern because of the mood that's created by cinematographers Manoj Paramahansa and Mahendran Jayaraj. 

Their work is equally complemented by Govind Vasantha's background score and songs. All songs except a romantic number fit in very well with the narrative and adds up to the film's strength. The plot itself is conceived with great clarity, which is remarkable for a debutant filmmaker. 

The film is laced with situational humour and at no place does the director choose to go ambitious with the jokes or gags, meaning there are no unnecessary lines for the sake of humour. Instead he does the opposite. Wherever there's scope for comedy, he grabs them with open arms and gets the desired result. 

To top all this, Vijay Sethupathi and Parthiepan have an invisible combat on screen to show the audience who is the better actor. The result of it doesn't matter, because at the end of the day it's the audience who are served a treat. Raashi Khanna and Bagavathi Perumal too score well in their portions. It would have been great if the emotions between Manjima Mohan's character (who plays Singam's younger sister) and Singam were handled a bit better.

Overall, Thuglaq Darbar is a film where you've to really dig in deep to find flaws, if you are in the mood for nitpicking. With a fairly entertaining and engaging screenplay, strong technical work and solid performances, the film gets almost everything right.