Rating : 3.3/5
Genre : Thriller
Year : 2019
Running time : 2 hours
Director : Ashwin Saravanan
Cast : Taapsee Pannu, Vinodhini Vaidynathan, Parvathi T.
Kid rating : PG-15
Swapna (Pannu) and maid Kalamma (Vaidyanathan) live in a house in Gurugram/Gurgaon. Owing to a horrific incident in the past, Swapna suffers from PTSD and anxiety attacks. As a result she is a scared and depressed recluse and works from home as a game developer. An unusual meeting with a stranger gives her hope and she decides to fight to rebuild her life. However problems arise in the shape of a serial killer who makes her his next target.
If you’ve seen the trailer you know the storyline and predictable end: hapless girl in wheelchair battles psychotic killer. And wins. Given that, the director must build the how and why – which is, IMHO, hard. The whole genre is hard, because you have to get it just right to maintain the edge-of-seat-suspense. Keeping that in mind, Game Over is a valiant effort but does not make it into must-see territory.
Director and writer Saravanan lays the groundwork by filling us in on Swapna’s past and her day-to-day struggles at living a normal life. However her character is always at a remove and I couldn’t quite get invested in her life. There was repetition in the portrayal of her story and there wasn’t enough nuance, leaving us with unanswered questions. Harping on the same chords didn’t do much good. Taapsee is a great actress (remember Manmarziyan?) but here she veers between 2 flavors – more harried and less harried.
The film has great “creepiness” factor – 2 women alone in a rambling old house in lacking-in-infrastructure Gurgaon. There are some genuinely scary moments, and I loved the way the game-angle is built into the climax! Game Over had the potential to be a crisp, taut thriller but is let down by limp editing and a patchy storyline. The film was originally made in Telugu/Tamil and dubbed in Hindi. The dubbing was stilted, and some of the translation was weird; it felt like the translation was almost word-to-word leading to a sentence structure which a natural Hindi speaker would never construct.
Kidwise: Scary for the young ones. Violence with sharp objects and shots of beheadings.
