Con City (2026) opens with an ordinary family suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Saravana (Arjun Das) runs a small restaurant with his wife Mithra (Anna Ben). There is obviously tension in the relationship, but they stay together in order to take care of their wheelchair-bound seven year old son Jeeva (Akhilan), with Mithra's brother Jackie (Yogi Babu) and mother Janaki (Vadivukkarasi) helping with both home and business. One day Saravana is late picking up Jeeva from school, and by the time he arrives someone else has taken the boy. Nobody knows who this person is . . . until the family gets a good look at the CCTV footage, and the whole family immediately recognizes the perpetrator.
The film skips back seven years, when the family wasn't ordinary or even a family yet. Saravana is working for the power company while quietly struggling to repay the loans his mother took out years ago. Mithra is alone and pregnant, and only discovers that she's been the victim of a real estate scam when she's thrown out of the house she thought she leased. Jackie is an aspiring actor hoping to fulfill his late father's dreams when he discovers that Janaki has cancer and needs a great deal of money for an operation, and soon.
And so they all make questionable choices. Saravana begins skimming payments at the power company, then funnels the money through his stockbroker friend Satha (Sathanand) to create a pyramid scheme. Mithra begins a real estate scheme of her own, and she turns out to be really good at it. And Jackie and Janaki receive enough money in donations through the charitable trust established by Jackie's father (a former stuntman) to pay for Janaki's operation, only to discover that the doctor is incompetent and she's fine. Janaki insists that they keep the money and use it to fund Jackie's debut film; he doesn't want to, but she's his mother, so he agrees.
Mithra, Jackie and Janaki all invest their money with Saravana. Saravana invests the money with his childhood friend Sabari, who promises a large return after a smuggling deal. But Sabari is killed, everyone's cons manage to collapse at once, and the characters are all brought in by the ferocious police inspector Sundaram (Nanda Gopal). Sundaram wants to know where the money is, and uses all the police brutality at his disposal to find out, but everyone tells him the truth and he does not believe them. When it becomes clear that he plans to arrange for them to be killed in "an encounter," Saravana masterminds a jailbreak, and the group stays together; the others are hoping that Saravana will eventually lead them to the money.
Back to the present. The man on the video taking Jeeva away is Sundaram. He's found them. Saravana insists on going back home and turning himself in, hoping that Sundaram will release Jeeva and let the others go. The others insist on coming along. But Sundaram is no longer a policeman, he's retired, with a bad gambling habit. He doesn't want them arrested, he wants them working for him, and he reveals that he let them escape; he's been quietly returning criminals to the wild for years, so that he can make use of their talents later.
This is a con artist movie, so there are schemes within schemes and it's not clear who is playing who until the very end. It's not the most devious plotting I've ever seen on film, but everything more or less hangs together and the big reveal at the end makes sense.
However the movie is not entirely focused on the cons. It's also about the fake family evolving into a found family, and learning to trust and rely on each other. They also manage to avoid the obvious romantic track, at the end Saravana and Mithra are getting along better, and may have moved to a real relationship, but they're still primarily together for the sake of the kid. It's both refreshing and sensible, since the script doesn't really have room for romance on top of everything else.
