| Director | Mani Ratnam |
|---|---|
| Budget | ₹50 crore |
Bergmans, a brilliant but unruly student, is thrown out of his seminary for sinning the flesh after being caught red-handed by fellow student Sam Fernando. Blaming the good-hearted Sam for his ouster, Bergmans vows revenge and challenges to prove that evil does reign supreme in this world. Sam finishes his education and training and arrives at a village as the new father of the local church. A local boy named Thomas of this village, the illegitimate son of a local fisherman named Chetty Barnabodas, has grown up in a rough neighbourhood following his mother's death and thus being forced to fend for himself.
Sam takes the rundown church and sceptical villagers in his stride and starts bringing about changes. Through a series of incidents, he also manages to get the unruly Thomas under his control and gets him to learn the tricks of the fishing trade from the villagers. A few years later, Thomas grows up very close to Sam, a well-respected person in the village. Thomas comes across Beatrice "Bea" when she is running away from her convent school group, which had gotten her admitted to the hospital. They keep running into each other a few times, and Thomas eventually likes her presence.
Meanwhile, as Sam meditates on the remote beach, he hears gunshots on the sand. On investigation, he finds an unconscious Bergmans in the waters. On seeing that the shooters are still lurking around trying to finish their job of killing Bergmans, he pulls him to safety into an abandoned ship to take care of his bullet injuries with the help of a local village woman as well as a woman named Celina from a distant village that Bergmans asks him to get. A few villagers, including Chetty, who see Sam running around in the dark with the two women, get suspicious and accuse the three of sleeping together. They call the Bishop, upon whose interrogation, Celina admits to the sin, and Sam gets unfairly implicated. One of the villagers is also killed in the ensuing mêlée, and Sam is sentenced to four years of rigorous imprisonment.
Bergmans visits Sam in prison and admits that he got the woman to implicate him falsely to prove that evil will always triumph. When Sam returns from prison, he discovers that Thomas has fallen in cahoots with Bergmans in his smuggling trade and has committed many sins in his desire to make the village people bow before him. Thomas and Bea have also fallen in love with each other and come to seek Sam's blessings. Thomas subsequently gets to know that Bea is Bergmans's daughter and he takes Bea to Bergmans's house to trigger some long-lost memories when she recalls all the previous horrific incidents of her father, including the one of killing her mother. Bergmans gets angry, abducts Sam and Bea in his boat, and goes out to sea to kill them. However, even after a few feeble attempts, Bergmans who claims to have no emotional ties to family finds himself unable to kill his own daughter.. Thomas comes chasing them, and after a long fight between the three, he and Sam subdue Bergmans.
The film ends on a note that good finally triumphs over evil, whether Sam and Thomas's triumph over Bergmans, Thomas's suppression of his sinister inclination and rejoining forces with Sam, or Bergmans's good nature coming out in his inability to kill Bea.