Game Over

GAME OVER is the story of gamer fighting demons inside her and also in the outside world. In December 2017, in Sector 101 in Gurugram, a young girl named Amrutha (Sanchana Natarajan) is stalked by an unknown killer while she's enjoying her meal in her house, all alone. Sometime later, the killer enters her house, assaults her and takes her out of the house in a football field. Here, he beheads her and sets her body on fire.

Ashwin Saravanan's Game Over, a Tamil-Telugu bilingual film dubbed in Hindi, is a compact, fast-paced thriller with a dash of the paranormal. It has the potential to tie you up in knots as you try and grasp what is real and what isn't in a layered plot that pits a gamer intent on improving her Pac-Man scores against the maze in her stressed-out mind.

Terrible things happen to women in Game Over. They get beheaded, sexually assaulted, stalked, stabbed, humiliated and beaten mercilessly. It's almost as if director Ashwin Saravanan is perversely testing the waters to see what more he can put his mostly female cast through. It's nasty and tedious and honestly, the only thing that got me through was the steely expression on Taapsee Pannu's face as she soldiered on.

The central character in Ashwin Saravanan's horror-tinged thriller is a video game creator, so it follows that her travails resemble a series of obstacles. Some of these are in her head. Sapna (Taapsee Pannu) is a survivor of a crime that has left her anxiety-ridden. In a sprawling house with only the household help, Kalamma (Vinothini), and a guard for company, Sapna tries to get back to work while listlessly trying to improve her score on the classic video game Pac-Man.

Amutha(Sanchana Natrajan) lives alone in her house on a lonely street. Someone is watching her. From a distance. The perpetrator breaks into her house, ties her up and wraps her face with a plastic cover. She dies a tragic death. Beheaded and body set on fire. This introduction sequence explains the intensity of Ashwin Saravanan's Game Over.

Is it possible to feel horror-struck and uplifted at the same time? Director Ashwin Saravanan's Game Over is a rare thriller to offer both scares and soul in its 103 minutes duration. Some of the darkest thoughts and deepest fears manifest into the spine-chilling core of Game Over, a film that speaks as strongly as it feels.

A surreal psychopath is on the prowl, he beheads females, burns them and plays football with those decapitated heads and it just 5 mins the movie has started. So it's a slasher?, so far so good but hell breaks loose when we meet Sapna (Tapsee Pannu) - a video game expert and a victim of rape, battling her trauma and sudden fear for darkness, getting haunted by a tattoo and that psychopath coming straight from Friday the 13th series, armed with swords, sickle and a camcorder. Will Sapna survive? forms the crux of the narrative.

I dropped coffee on myself at one point post the halfway mark in Game Over. This happened at a moment so startling in the film, that I think I let out an involuntary yelp of surprise and my paper-cup-holding hand reflexively shot up to cover my mouth. The coffee stain is gone, but the fear evoked by that scene still lingers. Taapsee Pannu stars as Swapna, a stay-at-home video game professional in writer-director Ashwin Saravanan's film.

Dealing with post traumatic stress disorder, Sapna (Taapsee Pannu) who has a phobia for darkness, leads a lonely existence. She stays in a spacious bungalow in Gurugram solely with her maid. A brutal murder in the past has a strange bearing on her condition. Can she pull her act together when fear comes knocking once again?

What would you do if you have been left petrified of the dark after a traumatic incident? Game Over builds swiftly up to its main act, which has the broken-in-spirit Swapna (Pannu) trying to re-build her courage, using her work as distraction, and her affectionate house-help Kalamma (Vaidyanathan) as constant companion.

Game Over's intensely suspenseful opening scene sets the tone for its proceedings. It begins like your typical home invasion thriller, with a masked perpetrator standing outside a teenager's house, intently monitoring her movements. He breaks into the house to find her taking a shower - Hitchcock's Psycho comes to mind. Ashwin quickly cuts the scene to show the woman's suffering; her face covered with a plastic bag and hands tied.

I didn't walk into Game Over expecting a Red Dead Redemption II poster in the heroine's bedroom. The 2018 game is a moral struggle set around the fading of the Wild West, and a genuine milestone in game storytelling, with astounding details and an encouragingly interactive open world. With influences like that, one would imagine director Ashwin Saravanan would create an innovative film.

Ashwin Saravanan's, Game Over, is actually a Telugu film dubbed in Hindi. It is one of those films that gets you on the edge of the seat almost immediately as it starts. The film opens with a chilling murder wherein a young girl Amrita's (Sanchana Natrajan) life is brutally snuffed out, setting the tone for what is to follow. Quite evidently there is a criminal on the loose, out on a killing spree. The swiftness with which the screenplay establishes the presence of an almost invisible culprit lurking around is remarkable. As a member of the audience you are left with no choice but to keenly anticipate about what's going to happen next. But, this is not a whodunit.