Game Over Hindi Movie
The opening credits are really cool. But that does not a film make. You begin to giggle when they try to set up Taapsee Pannu as a designer of game characters, or is she a game developer? Or just a video game nut? But with such cool video games available on Xbox today, it does not explain why she's playing Pac Man that is dated! (The Pac Man championship game on the Xbox is rather awesome with choices in setting - like Manhattan, Spiral, Train station and so on - and the ghosts are cool too!) If she's a designer, for games, why is she drawing Super Mario type characters on a sketchbook? Game designers use graphic tablets... and don't bother to look at her computer screen at all...
Okay so she like Pac Man, and plays it all night because she cannot sleep. She says it too. But she does wake up on the sofa every single time from her nightmares. She has a maid looking after her.
Kalamma the maid is played by Vinodhini. It looks like concern, but she's rather intrusive and even shows up sitting with her at the shrink's. Before you ask why is the maid sitting at the session, you sigh because they show why she's terrified of the darkness. Again. Looks like the director likes this women tied up trope. Because in the beginning of the film, a young woman was tied up (with plastic ties and plastic bag over her face) killed horribly. We were also told of several young women being beheaded and burnt etc. That part of the film looks inspired from a bad Korean serial killer film. We only have Netflix to blame for such a scene. It's too lame to be scary.
But Kalamma offers unintended hilarity when the serial killer shows up at the heroine's home. Oh yes, by this time Taapsee is on a wheelchair, her legs are broken. Kalamma gets a chance to be all melodramatic and googly eyed with horror and fear.
And yes, Taapsee got herself a tattoo that has a creepy explanation that means little but create logical questions: how is the tattoo studio still working if they mixed up ink meant for someone else on her? How come the tattoo person realises the mistake and does not follow up apart from, 'I tried to call you...'
You swallow these silly things and then after intermission (completely unnecessary, since the film loses steam) the story picks up when an intruder shows up at her home. No one knows why or how he chooses his victims, and you realise you don't care. Home Alone was more fun and this is not the scary version of that film. It's not even interesting enough to be Groundhog Day. It just takes one decent metaphor from video game and uses it. But Detective Pikachu was more fun and so was Pixels which showed us an evil Pac Man.
The dubbing in Hindi is plain awful (the film releases simultaneously in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu). The girl dying of plastic bag asphyxiation is shot really well, but it goes nowhere, so you just know they're trying too hard. How did Anurag Kashyap buy this concept, I wonder. And the serial killer breathes like Darth Vader - to scare us, presumably - ends up sounding asthmatic. The film is 103 minutes long. Just feels longer.
